The Brief

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions. The equipment in space is state of the art and is expected to function for many more years, according to scientists who worked on the missions. An official review by NASA in 2023 found that "the data are of exceptionally high quality" and recommended continuing the mission for at least three years.

Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

NASA employees who work on the two missions are making what the agency calls Phase F plans for both carbon-monitoring missions, according to David Crisp, a longtime NASA engineer who designed the instruments and managed the missions until he retired in 2022. Phase F plans lay out options for terminating NASA missions.

Crisp says NASA employees making those termination plans have reached out to him for his technical expertise. "What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren't allowed to tell me that that's what they were told to do. But they were allowed to ask me questions," Crisp says. "They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan."

Three other academic scientists who use data from the missions confirmed that they, too, have been contacted with questions related to mission termination. All three asked for anonymity because they are concerned that speaking about the mission termination plans publicly could endanger the jobs of the NASA employees who contacted them.

Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Donald Trump's proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins Oct. 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request.

A rocket launches carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite on July 2, 2014, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

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Congress funded the missions and may fund them again

Presidential budget proposals are wish lists that often bear little resemblance to final congressional budgets. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions have already received funding from Congress through the end of the 2025 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Draft budgets that Congress is currently considering for next year keep NASA funding basically flat. But it's not clear whether these specific missions will receive funding again, or if Congress will pass a budget before current funding expires on Sept. 30.

Last week, NASA announced it will consider proposals from private companies and universities that are willing to take on the cost of maintaining the device that is attached to the International Space Station, as well as another device that measures ozone in the atmosphere.

NASA did not respond to questions from NPR about whether other missions will also be privatized, or about why the agency is making plans to potentially terminate projects that may receive funding in Congress' next budget.

In July, congressional Democrats sent a letter to acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy warning his agency not to terminate missions that Congress has funded, and arguing that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and its director, Russ Vought, are overstepping by directing NASA and other agencies to stop spending money that Congress has already appropriated.

"Congress has the power of the purse, not Trump or Vought," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the authors of the letter and the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in an email to NPR. "Eliminating funds or scaling down the operations of Earth-observing satellites would be catastrophic and would severely impair our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to severe weather and climate disasters. The Trump administration is forcing the proposed cuts in its FY26 budget request on already appropriated FY25 funds. This is illegal."

A spokesperson for OMB told NPR via email that "OMB had nothing to do with NASA Earth Science leadership's request for termination plans." The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did not respond to questions from NPR.

In the past, Vought has been vocal about cutting what he sees as inappropriate spending on projects related to climate change. Before he joined the Trump administration, Vought authored sections of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 roadmap for remaking the federal government. In that document, Vought wrote that "the Biden Administration's climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding" and argued that federal regulators should make it easier for commercial satellites to be launched.

The data from these missions is even more valuable than intended

The missions are called Orbiting Carbon Observatories because they were originally designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But soon after they launched, scientists realized that they were also accidentally measuring plant growth on Earth.

Basically, when plants are growing, photosynthesis is happening in their cells. And that photosynthesis gives off a very specific wavelength of light. The OCO instruments in space measure that light all over the planet.

"NASA and others have turned this happy accident into an incredibly valuable set of maps of plant photosynthesis around the world," explains Scott Denning, a longtime climate scientist at Colorado State University who worked on the OCO missions and is now retired. "Lo and behold, we also get these lovely, high resolution maps of plant growth," he says. "And that's useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements."

A soybean field near Clinton, Ill. Information collected by NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite instruments is unexpectedly useful for predicting crop yields, because it allows scientists to monitor plant growth from space.

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For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many private agricultural consulting companies use the data to forecast and track crop yield, drought conditions and more.

The information can also help predict future political instability, since crop failures are a major driver of mass migration all over the world. For example, persistent drought in Honduras is one factor that has led many farmers there to migrate north, NPR reporting found. And damage to crops and livestock from extreme weather in Northern Africa has contributed to migration from that region. "This is a national security issue, for sure," Crisp says.

Carbon-monitoring satellites have revolutionized climate science

The carbon dioxide data that the instruments were originally designed to collect has revolutionized scientists' understanding of how quickly carbon dioxide is collecting in the atmosphere.

That's because measuring carbon dioxide with instruments in various locations on the Earth's surface, as scientists have been doing since the 1950s, doesn't provide information about the whole planet. Satellite data, on the other hand, covers the entire Earth.

And that data showed some surprising things. "Fifty years ago we thought the tropical forests were like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking up carbon dioxide," Denning explains. "Now we know they're not."

Instead, boreal forests in the northern latitudes suck up a significant amount of carbon dioxide, the satellite data shows. And the patterns of which areas absorb the planet-warming gas, and how much they absorb, are continuously changing as the climate changes.

"The value of these observations is just increasing over time," explains Anna Michalak, a climate researcher at Carnegie Science and Stanford University who has worked extensively on greenhouse gas monitoring from space. "These are missions that are still providing critical information."

It is expensive to end satellite missions

The cost of maintaining the two OCO satellite missions up in space is a small fraction of the amount of money taxpayers already spent to design and launch the instruments. The two missions cost about $750 million to design, build and launch, according to David Crisp, the retired NASA engineer, and that number is even higher if you include the cost of an initial failed rocket launch that sent an identical carbon dioxide measuring instrument into the ocean in 2009.

By comparison, maintaining both OCO missions in orbit costs about $15 million per year, Crisp says. That money covers the cost of downloading the data, maintaining a network of calibration sensors on the ground and making sure the stand-alone satellite isn't hit by space debris, according to Crisp.

"Just from an economic standpoint, it makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data," Crisp says.

NASA's recent call for universities and companies to potentially take over the cost of maintaining the OCO instrument attached to the International Space Station suggests the agency is also considering privatizing NASA science missions. Such partnerships raise a host of thorny questions, says Michalak, who has worked with private companies, nonprofit groups, universities and the federal government on greenhouse gas monitoring satellite projects.

"On the one hand the private sector is really starting to have a role," Michalak says. In recent years, multiple private groups in the U.S. have launched satellites that measure methane, a potent planet-warming gas that is poorly monitored compared to carbon dioxide.

"Looking at it from the outside, it can look like the private sector is really picking up some of what the federal agencies were doing in terms of Earth observations," she explains. "And it's true that they're contributing." But, she says, "Those efforts would not be possible without this underlying investment from public funding."

Copyright 2025 NPR

Progressives across the country are undeniably having a moment.

Voters are rallying behind populist, insurgent-left candidates like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Randy Villegas in California’s 22nd Congressional District.

But in the race to succeed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s representative in Congress, the city’s voters are split between two Democratic candidates who both claim the title of “progressive.”

The major fault line? Housing and urban development.

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who has Pelosi’s endorsement, is pitching herself as a fighter for working families who’s immune to the influence of corporate PACs and the deep-pocketed tech industry that supports her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener. She has characterized Wiener, a fierce advocate for LGBTQ rights who made national headlines for a bill to unmask ICE agents, as a “corporate Democrat bankrolled by billionaires.”

But Chan’s own legacy of thwarting housing development projects and zoning changes in her district could turn off some progressive voters, especially those new to city politics. San Francisco voters have for decades tended to oppose new building projects, favoring neighborhood preservation over additional housing.

That attitude largely contributed to the housing crisis the city now faces. Rent costs have hit a historic high as Bay Area tech workers hit the AI windfall — one recent industry report found the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment has surpassed $4,000.

“Progressivism in San Francisco has really become very tied to this identity where it doesn’t say ‘yes’ to a lot of stuff,” said Jane Natoli, a housing advocate who lives in Chan’s supervisorial district and supports Wiener.

“For whatever reason, especially on issues such as housing, San Francisco progressives have largely said ‘no.’”

In the June primary, voters chose Wiener and Chan over former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez staffer Saikat Chakrabarti, who excited younger voters with his messages echoing those of Mamdani and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. The tech millionaire aligned with Wiener on the need to turbocharge new housing construction, yet embraced the anti-establishment, anti-corporate attitude.

“I really liked him so much because it was like a very ‘Yes, and’ approach to YIMBYism,” said Alex Vanscoy, Chakrabarti’s former field director. Now he backs Chan, who has promised not to take any corporate PAC money, saying “taking money from lobbyists is a huge issue to me.”

Wiener and Chan concur that affordability is the top issue for San Franciscans and agree the city suffers a shortage of housing across all income levels. But they differ profoundly on the role of state and federal governments in fixing the issue.

What’s the root of the housing crisis?

Wiener believes the state should ensure that local governments actually build new housing, rather than just promise to do so, especially cities and counties that have long resisted new construction. As a standard-bearer for the abundance and Yes in my Backyard movements, he authored legislation, eventually signed into law, that eliminated regulatory hurdles for certain building permits, pleasing both labor and developers. City officials have told the Legislature that the “streamlining” policy has shortened the average permit wait times from years to three to six months.

Chan has largely opposed new housing and development projects, saying she’s prioritizing tenants who would be displaced and small businesses that could lose business during construction. She has said that the “urban renewal” of the city’s Fillmore district from the 1950s through 1970s had detrimental effects on San Francisco’s Black community and doesn’t want the same to happen in other neighborhoods. The backlash to that urban renewal gave rise to the modern San Francisco progressive.

“I think we’re starting to see the real divide show up,” said Eric Kingsbury, a Wiener supporter and member of the San Francisco County Central Committee, the local Democratic arm. “I would really expect to see a lot of discomfort, because if you are pro-housing and you’re an otherwise progressive person, you have a candidate in this race, and it’s Scott Wiener.”

Chan, who is one of the four most left-leaning members on the San Francisco board, recently voted against moderate Mayor Daniel Lurie’s family zoning plan — a state-mandated revamp that seeks to increase density and building heights near public transit stations and on major thoroughfares. Chan previously led an effort to sue the state on the grounds that its housing requirements unfairly targeted San Francisco. She said she opposed Lurie’s plan because it didn’t include enough safeguards to prevent demolition of rent-controlled units and displacement of tenants and small businesses.

“I think for people to say that she’s anti-development is kind of ridiculous,” said Norman Yee, a former San Francisco supervisor who supports Chan. “All she wants is to make sure that number one, tenants don’t get displaced, and two, to make sure that community concerns are addressed.”

In 2021, Chan helped kill a proposal for a nearly 500-unit mixed-income development proposed for an empty parking lot a block from a BART station, prompting The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board to excoriate the then-eight progressive supervisors for sabotaging “seemingly all earnest attempts to deal with this city’s housing crisis.”

Outside of housing, Chan also railed against a plan to build an express lane for a bus route that was one of the busiest in the country prior to the pandemic, protesting the loss of parking spaces and arguing that small businesses would suffer during the construction. The city’s transit agency approved it anyway.

Chan has objected to Sacramento involvement in local planning and zoning. She argues that corporate developers and the Wall Street real estate industry have convinced lawmakers like Wiener to allow them to bypass local review and zoning regulations — an attack Wiener described as “tired” and untrue.

“We can still have accountability, we can still have environmental review and improve government efficiency at the same time,” Chan said.

Chan points to her support of a recent 98-unit affordable housing development for seniors, which she features in her campaign launch video. Chan highlighted that no existing tenants had to be displaced since it was built on the site of an abandoned funeral home.

“I always make this joke that if anybody got evicted from the site, it was a ghost from the funeral home,” Chan said.

In the video, Chan touts that she would “build real affordable housing, not the Sacramento version that destroys our neighborhoods.”

Wiener said the building, which opened last November, was made possible largely because of his Senate Bill 35, a landmark law Wiener introduced to fast-track building permits, along with close to $60 million in state funding.

“If you’re trying to make it harder and more expensive to build housing, or even impossible to build, then that’s not progressive,” Wiener said. “That’s conservative.”

It’s still unclear whether San Franciscans who supported Chakrabarti, who won about 18% of primary voters in June, will coalesce behind Chan or Wiener in November.

Other divisive issues

Housing isn’t the only issue in the race.

Wiener, who is Jewish, alienated some progressives by resisting using the word “genocide” to describe the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After public pressure mounted following a tense candidate forum, Wiener reversed himself and explained his decision in a video on social media.

The reversal landed awkwardly at best and offended enough members of the Jewish community that he was forced to step down as chair of the Legislative Jewish caucus. Others deemed his change of heart performative and “too little, too late.” Months later, pro-Palestine hecklers berated and harassed him so aggressively at the city’s trans march that he left the event.

Wiener’s back-and-forth on the use of “genocide” has created trust issues for a lot of younger voters, said Kaizen Betts-LaCroix, another former Chakrabarti staffer who supports Chan. Betts-LaCroix said Chan’s unequivocal opposition to military aid to Israel and her rejection of corporate PAC money are main reasons they back her.

The senator and his campaign have also faced criticism for negative and mean-spirited attacks, including repeating the misleading claim that Chakrabarti lived in Maryland and a now-defunct parody AI chatbot that mimicked Chan and cheekily criticized her obstructive record on housing and other issues.

Pelosi, who has wielded her influence to boost Chan’s campaign, immediately denounced the site and rallied several high-profile Democrats, including seven female members of Congress and former Mayor Willie Brown, to join her.

“Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power,” Pelosi declared on social media. “We should not have to now fight against artificial intelligence putting words in our mouths.”

Within days, Wiener’s campaign deactivated the site, took down the billboards promoting it and apologized for offending voters, acknowledging that the site “missed the mark.”

Did you know Orange County was once home to one of the trippiest and perhaps the most prescient science fiction writers of the 20th century?

That man was Philip K. Dick, who once called Santa Ana home.

This week, the Philip K. Dick Festival will celebrate the work and honor the O.C. legacy of the sci-fi master at Cal State Fullerton.

‘A big idea guy’ 

Most stories about Philip K. Dick — or PKD as many fans refer to him — start out with a list of Hollywood adaptations of his work: Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle... and the list goes on.

Dick’s more than 40 novels and some 120 short stories are filled with explorations of what it means to be human, untrustworthy realities and generally mind-bending narratives.

“Philip K. Dick’s novels are basically impossible to film. But he’s a big idea guy and the ideas seem to excite a lot of Hollywood producers,” said David Sandner, an English professor at Cal State Fullerton.

The Pollak Library at Cal State Fullerton houses a Philip K. Dick archive, which includes original manuscripts, correspondence and recordings of the author talking as a guest speaker in the 1970s.

Philip K. Dick with his literary papers.

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“Science fiction is a world where you could be,” Dick can be heard saying on the recording. “You always feel this thin tenuous line between your world and a good science fiction novel.”

Some fans who read Dick now might feel that tenuous line disappearing more than ever. Take for instance the fictional news device known as a "homeopape" from his novel Ubik, first published in 1969. It prints out articles based on a user’s interests and allows them to dial in the specific, niche news they want to read. Sound familiar?

“He understood that the technology was going to get inside of our heads... Which is what the algorithms are doing now. Right? They’re being set and then they’re being shifted more and more to bring us under control,” Sandner said from the third floor of the Pollak Library, where the Philip K. Dick papers are stored.

Dick grew up and spent the majority of his days writing in the San Francisco Bay area. Still somewhat obscure and recovering from a self-harm incident in Vancouver, a professor at Cal State Fullerton named Willis E. McNelly invited Dick out to Orange County in the early '70s, where he continued to write, give guest lectures and eventually donate many of his papers to the library.

Patrice Prestinary, archivist and special collections librarian at the Pollak Library, said Dick’s papers have been moved to their own, more accessible spot because they are so frequently requested.

The collection of PKD-related material includes colorful 1950s and 60s-era paperbacks emblazoned with rocket ships and psychedelic visions.

Patrice Prestinary in the Pollak Library's PKD archives.

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But Prestinary said many researchers who come here are seeking out the more personal ephemera.

“You know, writing to his mother and talking about really ordinary things like paying bills and his cat,” she said. “Sometimes they just want to know the man behind these stories that they love.”

The man behind those stories spent the last 10 years of his life in Orange County, including at a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Ana.

Pink beams and O.C. friends 

During that period, Dick had some of his most trippy, spiritual experiences, including a run-in with a pink beam of light that he believed imparted transcendent wisdom.

“He himself is a character. And once you start learning about his life and the experiences that he had... It’s interesting because then his own life became like his novels,” author and Dick researcher Keith Giles told LAist. Giles will release a set of PKD-inspired novellas from seven authors at this week’s festival.

But it wasn’t just transcendental experiences — Dick was making plenty of more terrestrial friends in Orange County, too. Those include author Tim Powers, who will be part of a panel called “Phil’s Orange County Friends” on Aug. 22.

“In a lot of ways, I think he really felt like Orange County saved his life,” said David Agranoff, author and co-host of the Dickheads podcast.

“I don’t think he felt like he could change his life if he didn’t go somewhere else,” Agranoff said, citing Dick’s struggles with substance use in the San Francisco Bay area.

Dick died in 1982, just a few months before the release of Blade Runner, which was loosely based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film skyrocketed his name into the mainstream.

“He’s this 20th century writer who’s almost more relevant today than he was then,” Agranoff, an organizer of the festival, said.

The festival features a wide range of talks and panels exploring everything from quantum physics and artificial intelligence to death and the afterlife in the author’s works.

“He wrote about all those things and it gives us a chance to talk about not just science fiction, but philosophy and politics,” Agranoff said. “And the festival becomes this way to expand out into the universe... from the view that Phil gave us.”

Lawmakers on Thursday killed a controversial plan that could have allowed grizzly bears to one day return to California.

The Assembly Appropriations Committee spiked Inglewood Democratic Sen. Laura Richardson’s Senate Bill 1305. The measure would have tasked the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with creating a “roadmap that evaluates whether, and under what conditions, reintroduction of the grizzly bear is feasible and advisable.”

As is typical with the Legislature’s appropriations committees, lawmakers didn’t discuss the bill; nor did they take public testimony before the committee’s chairperson, Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, announced the decision.

Wicks later told reporters that before intentionally reintroducing grizzly bears, the state must figure out how humans can best coexist with predatory wildlife. She pointed to the controversial return of gray wolves to California and the subsequent loss of cattle.

“The state needs to really invest in how we are actually addressing and dealing with those conflicts,” she said.

Grizzlies once lived across most of California. As many as 10,000 may have roamed before the Gold Rush. They were so prevalent that when California settlers tried to form their own nation, they called it the Bear Flag Republic. A grizzly bear is memorialized on California’s flag.

Settlers systematically exterminated the animals. They were gone by the 1920s, leaving the smaller black bear as California’s only surviving native bear species.

Two Native American tribes consponsored the bill, and several animal welfare and environmental groups supported it. They argued that bringing the second largest land predator back to America’s most populated state would right an ecological wrong and help restore California’s degraded ecosystem.

Opponents included ranchers, hunting associations and rural communities. They argued California is far too populated with people to sustain another apex predator. Rural communities are already overwhelmed with conflicts with mountain lions, black bears and wolves that attack livestock and wander into their towns, opponents said.

The measure set aside no funding for the study, but it allowed for a future Legislature or an outside group to do so.

Yue Stella Yu contributed reporting.

Irvine opened a new pedestrian bridge this week that lets you pedal, scoot, or walk over the 5 Freeway.

I threw my bike in the car and went to check it out.

I parked at Cypress Community Park in Irvine and was soon biking over the 5. The bridge is only for pedestrians, bikes, and scooters — so no cars to worry about.

A new bridge in Irvine opened this week. It stretches across the 5 Freeway and connects to other trails in the city.

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The bridge, which opened on Aug. 11, is a key link in Orange County’s network of trails that can take cyclists and pedestrians all the way from the hills to the Pacific Ocean.

“It looks like they nailed it. This is great," said James Connolly, who was on a scouting trip from his home in Costa Mesa.

“ I wanna take my e-board, which can go about 30 miles, and go all the way to here and then turn around and go back, you know? It looks like that's feasible now," he continued.

The new bridge in Irvine opened this week.

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Sadia Kahn was trying to keep up with her two young boys, who were on scooters.

“ It's our first time here. We've been watching the construction for a while, so yeah, we're excited," she said.

Khan said she has come to really appreciate Irvine's network of parks and trails.

“Prior to having kids, it would just give me like the heebie-jeebies by how like manicured it is and then you have kids and you're like, "Oh, I get the hype," she said. "We've drank the Kool-Aid is what I'm trying to say.”