ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — Something was missing at the American Astronomical Society’s 246th meeting this year, a conference sometimes referred to as the “Superbowl of Astronomy.”
It’s a meeting that brings many of the country’s most renowned scientists into the same room to share what they’ve been working on and thinking about lately; as you can imagine, that tends to organically foster brand new ideas for exploring the universe. Being at these events, you can almost feel study blueprints sprouting up all around you in real-time. It’s electric.
But this summer, NASA wasn’t there. And in fact, the National Science Foundation cancelled its planned talk at the meeting, too.
Both institutions are household names in the astronomy community, and for good reason. They keep some of the field’s most vital instruments running — things like the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the trusty Hubble Space Telescope, the massive Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) and LIGO, the awesome gravitational wave detector that can sense black holes colliding across the universe. It therefore makes sense that both NASA and NSF usually penetrate these conferences from all directions.
However, at the last minute, both decided to cancel their formal attendance at this summer’s meeting — and their lack of presence was palpable.
“Honestly, it’s been a little devastating,” Kevin Hardegree-Ullman, a scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, told Space.com. “NASA always has a big presence at these meetings, and we do see a handful of NASA folks here, but they had to go through hoops to get approval.”
As his lab is technically affiliated with NASA as well, Hardegree-Ullman said even he experienced some of those complications: “My project is funded by NASA funding, but we’re a little bit different from NASA, so we’re able to get approval to travel domestically, but international travel is a lot harder now,” he said. “It’s really sad not seeing our many, many NASA colleagues here directly.”
“On the very first day of the opening reception, I was standing around with a couple of colleagues and we all looked at each other, like: ‘It seems small; it seems quiet,'” Colin Wallace, a teaching associate professor in physics education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told Space.com. “You can just feel the mood from the beginning.”
“What do you do then?” Spencer Riley, a graduate student at Montana State University who studies solar flares, told Space.com. “Like, the big players in astronomy can’t be here?”
What’s going on?
To be fair, AAS is a biannual meeting that happens every six months — and it’s true that the summer meetings are usually on the smaller side. But even so, scientists I spoke with found it pretty conspicuous for both NASA and NSF to pull out.
It’s also pertinent that this is the first AAS meeting to occur since the Trump administration took office and began implementing some hefty, controversial changes across these organizations.
For example, Trump-mandated changes at NASA and NSF included the cancellation of many programs that support Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) efforts and the implementation of significant layoffs across the board for federal employees and contractors. The White House’s FY 2026 budget proposals for both NASA and NSF that would get rid of quite a few important missions also were released prior to this meeting.
“I understand why they couldn’t come,” Riley said. “But that — in and of itself — feels like a sign.”
Furthermore, this isn’t the only conference NASA has pulled out of.
The agency, for instance, cancelled its International Space Station Research and Development Conference that was scheduled for the end of July in Seattle and withdrew its participation from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC).
Space.com reached out to NASA to question why they decided to pull out of the AAS conference and whether they intend to cancel any future conference attendances.
“NASA is evaluating our spending and prioritizing resources as we adjust our exploration objectives toward a renewed focus on human exploration to the moon and Mars. We’ll continue to evaluate conference participation on a case-by-case basis,” Bethany Stevens, a NASA spokesperson, told Space.com.
Of note, that statement appears to be in line with the White House’s NASA FY 2026 budget request released on May 30 that has yet to be passed by Congress. This request suggests slashing the agency’s science funding by nearly half — the largest single-year cut to NASA in American history — which would cancel several missions, including operational and in-development ones, and reduce the agency’s workforce by about a third.
The only part of this budget request that saw an increase was with regard to Mars missions; perhaps not much of a coincidence considering the president’s (former) affiliation with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. Musk is so focused on the goal of settling Mars with SpaceX’s Starship rocket that he even once said he wishes to “die on Mars.”
For example, the NASA FY26 budget summary says NASA should invest “more than $1 billion in new technology investments to enable a crewed mission to Mars” and that the agency should allocate “$200M for Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) to start launching robotic precursor missions to the Martian surface, and $80M to start deploying communications relay capabilities for Mars.”
Space.com also reached out to NSF to ask why they pulled out of this summer’s AAS meeting and whether they’ll be cancelling their attendance to any future meetings. NSF declined to comment.
The White House’s NSF FY26 budget request wasn’t much more encouraging. It could possibly shut down one of LIGO’s two sites, for instance, completely halt operations for DKIST, which is the world’s most powerful solar telescope that started delivering data relatively recently, and reduce the number of people involved in NSF science from over 330,000 to just around 90,000.
On just Wednesday (June 25), news came out that NSF staff (more than 1,800 workers) will be booted from the agency’s headquarters because the office space will be taken over by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) staff.
“I’m currently funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship,” Lucy Steffes, an astronomy and astrophysics Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. “My advisor does not have other money to pay me.”
Though her program isn’t immediately on the chopping block, Steffes says that if the budget cuts go through, this could be one of the programs cut in the next year or two. “Which would make it nearly impossible for me to finish my degree,” she said.
According to the NSF budget request outline, the NSF GRFP is suggested to be cut by over 50%, from 284.52 million in FY 2024 to 127.29 million in FY 2026.
Questions and no answers
One of the most obvious effects of NASA and NSF pulling out of the 246th AAS was their respective “Town Halls” were taken off the schedule.
Town Halls are some of the most populated events at these sorts of conferences — a favorite among reporters, students and scientists alike — during which institutions talk about updates to new projects, future budgets, current mission timelines, and proposal processes for graduate students just getting on the scene. There’s also always time for audience questions at the end.
Some scientists I spoke with wonder whether NASA and NSF’s cancellation of Town Halls had anything to do with the difficult questions that would likely have been directed toward both organizations.
Indeed, the Town Halls at this year’s meeting had some of these tense moments. At the National Solar Observatory’s Town Hall, some researchers questioned the speakers about what the end of certain facilities would mean for their work that depends on those projects. The Space Telescope Science Institute’s Town Hall discussed what a possible lack of funding for the JWST and Hubble would mean for these telescopes.
A public policy meeting on the final day involved early-career researchers actively fearing for their futures in the field if their grants are cancelled — including scientists affiliated with NASA — and late-career researchers enthusiastically voicing that maybe calling their representatives and peacefully petitioning for change isn’t enough.
“A lot of people are hopeful,” Riley said. “Of course, we want to be hopeful because the alternative sucks.”
University professors spoke up on behalf of their international students who couldn’t travel to the conference amid today’s political climate and nearly every attendee clapped, cheered and shouted in solidarity when someone shared a grievance about Trump-mandated changes — including the ones NASA and NSF have experienced.
Even outside of this summer’s AAS meeting, experts have decried what have been basically described as “soft layoffs” that recently took place at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory through a sudden return-to-in-person-work-or-resign order, and NASA’s DEIA crackdown has left many scientists from minority groups dismayed. In general, progressive goals the agency once championed have been changed to be more in line with Trump’s conservative agenda.
The NSF has even added a rule on its website that states it “will not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
This was added “per the Presidential Action announced January 20, 2025,” the website states.
It is yet to be known whether NASA and NSF will continue pulling out of meetings prized for their candid conversations in favor of more rehearsed events — but what is clear from my discussions with scientists at AAS is that scientific meetings are meant for open-mindedness and honesty for the sake of forward-thinking, yet changes trickling down from Washington D.C. aren’t really allowing for open-mindedness, nor honesty.
“Absolutely, we are given rules by our own institutions about what we can and cannot say,” Hardegree-Ullman said. “I think, for the most part, we have to be very clear that we’re talking on behalf of ourselves and not our institutions.”
“All of a sudden, words that were okay to use six months ago are now not okay,” Wallace said. “And it feels like if you use those words, that could have adverse consequences for your institution — for your job.”
But as Riley said — and what many others at this AAS conference quietly echoed — hope can be stabilizing.
“That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be out there advocating for the funding, and going to protests, or contacting your congresspeople and writing those letters, calling those offices, and doing all that advocacy,” Hardegree-Ullman said.
“We definitely should be doing that.”
