FORBES - Preliminary budget cuts proposed by the Trump Administration would slash a huge swath out of NASA's Venus science funding. And it would spell the end of the space agency’s much anticipated $500 million DAVINCI mission, an orbiter and atmospheric probe, which had been due for launch to our sister planet in 2030.
The Trump White House shared a draft version of its 2026 budget request for NASA with the space agency, as Ars Technica first revealed last week. The proposed preliminary budget calls for a 30 percent cut to the space agency’s planetary science budget, taking it down to only $1.929 billion, Ars Technica reports.
DAVINCI is a NASA-led mission; not only is it a return to Venus, it's a return to the surface, which has not been done for a long, long time, Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, and a member of NASA’s DAVINCI science team, tells me by phone.