NSS COO Dale Skran added, "While we understand NASA's need to respond to a reduced overall budget, the decision to cut New Horizons funding seems shortsighted. This comes after a letter signed by a dozen notable space leaders and citizen scientists, including Queen's Brian May, Carl Sagan's widow Ann Druyan, former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, and Bill Nye, was sent to NASA leadership protesting the cuts. The petition gathered over 7,000 signatures and numerous donations. To address this, NSS leadership joined with leaders from the Beyond Earth Institute and the Space Frontier Foundation to circulate a petition on to encourage NASA and the SMD to seek cuts elsewhere. Quitting this exploration prematurely, after spending nearly $1 billion to get New Horizons to the Kuiper Belt seems to many of us to be tragically mistaken, a poor use of taxpayer money, and a lost scientific opportunity that can never be recovered from." We have valuable new Kuiper Belt observations, and a search for a new flyby target, still to complete every year until we leave the Belt. Alan Stern said, “New Horizons is the only spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt, and the only one currently planned to go there. The resulting cuts would dismiss the scientists who have successfully overseen the mission since its launch and replace them with a new team that would operate at a much lower level, with resulting savings of only about $2-3 million. Specifically, NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), charged with implementing budget cuts for the upcoming year, selected New Horizons as one of the missions to be downscaled. Unfortunately, NASA has decided to cut funding to this modestly budgeted mission, and the National Space Society is doing its best to see that this does not occur." "It continues to operate well and is returning data from regions never explored. "New Horizons has flown a brilliant, near-flawless mission to some of the harshest regions in space," said Hoyt Davidson, Executive Vice President of the NSS. Massive amounts of scientific data were returned from both encounters, and more continues to come in from the furthest reaches of the solar system as the spacecraft continues to fly in excellent health, by some estimates capable of operating until at least 2050. It then swung past a planetoid called Arrokoth in the Kuiper Belt, the vast region surrounding the outer solar system, in 2019. The New Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006 and flew past Pluto in 2015, the first probe to do so.
The joint NSS/Beyond Earth/Space Frontier Foundation letter was sent to NASA and Congressional leadership on September 13. Hoyt Davidson, NSS Executive Vice PresidentKENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA, USA, September 18, 2023/ / - The National Space Society recently joined forces with the Beyond Earth Institute and the Space Frontier Foundation to encourage NASA to rethink budget cuts to New Horizons, one of the most successful deep-space robotic missions in NASA's storied history.
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