State of American Science

A decades-old compact between science and society is broken

- BY ADAM ROGERS ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARI FOUZ Adam Rogers

LAST YEAR CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS started to worry that his space telescope was going to be killed. The mission had started taking shape nine years earlier, a billion-dollar orbiting observatory that would look back in time into the early universe to study the first black holes, the formation of galaxies, and more. Eight teams of researchers pitched NASA their ideas; Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was part of a group that wanted to deploy a new technology: x-ray mirrors made of single-crystal silicon. It sounded promising enough that in October 2024 Reynolds’s group got a $5-million grant from the agency to refine the idea—the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite, or AXIS. The scientists teamed up with spacecraft builders at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Everything seemed to be going pretty well,” Reynolds says. “And then we started to get hit by programmatic chaos.”

Last June the budget hawks in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed NASA into offering a broad package of buyouts, paid leave and early retirement. Over the next few weeks nearly 4,000 NASA employees—about a fifth of the workforce—took the deal. Reynolds’s AXIS team lost 20 people. The engineer designing the heaters to keep the x-ray mirror at a constant temperature: gone. The lead project manager: gone. William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope’s mirror technology: gone. “We were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they’d done and where we were with aspects of the design,” Reynolds says.