Once upon a time, the United States used to look up. And so did I.

When I was a child, my bedroom walls were a crowded atlas of longing, layered with both glossy posters of nebulae and newspaper clippings of American skylines. These were the two constellations of desire that set the coordinates of my imagination. I learned the names of planets before I could reliably spell the names of continents. I traced the interstate highways with my fingers as if they were orbits.  I kept a shoe box of museum leaflets and magazine cutouts that, to anyone else, looked like paper, but to me felt like a passport to a future where the two poles of my curiosity, space and the United States, would finally meet.

Almost a century before I discovered my passion for astronomy, a refugee physicist with a shock of hair, already famous for a theory that bent time to its own logic, arrived on an American shore carrying the last of Europe’s light in his head. A few years later, he lent his name to a short letter warning a distant president that the architecture of the atom could be turned into a weapon, and that the first nation to grasp that truth would shape the century. The year was 1933, the scientist was Albert Einstein, the president in question was Franklin Roosevelt, and the letter set in motion a chain of events that culminated in J. Robert Oppenheimer assembling an unruly congregation of genius on a New Mexican science Mecca. And for a brief, terrible, world-altering moment, the United States discovered that the steady funding of basic research and the gathering of talent from every corner of the globe could be instruments of national survival as surely as fleets and armies.

Albert Einstein’s arrival on American shores was more than a change of address. It was a transfer of gravity, a moment when a country chose to become a sanctuary for difficult minds and an engine for the most difficult work, and when it did, it discovered the blueprint for its own modern myth: that a democracy becomes stronger, safer, and larger in spirit when it backs its scientists with laboratories, budgets, and the institutional courage to let curiosity lead.

Between those two beginnings – a child studying star maps in a faraway room and a physicist disembarking onto a New Jersey dock – lies the thread that binds my loyalties. I grew up believing that the United States kept a light in the window for travelers who arrived with questions, and that the sky rewarded those who looked up with instruments fine enough to hear ancient photons whisper their stories. To me, these were never separate devotions. The posters of nebulae and the cutouts of American cities were pages of the same atlas, a single promise that a country and a cosmos could meet in the human act of building better ways to know.

So when budgets are drafted that shrink the very agencies tasked with turning wonder into knowledge, I think back to the little me with tape on my fingers and to the émigré who carried equations across the Atlantic, and I wonder: what becomes of a place that forgets both of them at once?

The Smallest Future in the Largest Sky

There is a particular kind of American confidence that once organized steel, capital, and imagination around undertakings so audacious they barely fit in a sentence. And it is precisely that confidence that the proposed 2026 budget would diminish, by taking a knife to NASA’s core, trimming roughly a quarter of its funding and nearly a third of its civil service, while quietly preparing to switch off important missions. Among them, New Horizons, which carried us past Pluto and into the Kuiper Belt, and Juno, which is still peeling back Jupiter’s clouds to map the deep engine of a giant world.

To anyone who has watched this movie before, the plot twist is not a twist at all. In 1993 Congress halted the Superconducting Super Collider after billions had been spent on the Texas prairie. The center of gravity in high-energy physics, which might have been anchored on American soil for a generation, migrated firmly to Europe, where the Large Hadron Collider delivered the Higgs boson in 2012. The US didn’t lack the talent to find the so called “God Particle”, but the US Government lacked the patience to hold a long view against a short season of austerity and small politics. You can trace the knock-on effects in faculty rosters, in graduate student flows, in industries downstream of high-energy instrumentation, in the quiet sense among young researchers that this is not a country where very large, very hard, very long projects are allowed to survive a bad month in the headlines.

The country’s current larger mood does not help. In the exhausted air after a pandemic, a style of politics has taken root that treats conspiracy as community. It is a short walk from performative skepticism about vaccines to rhetorical assaults on public health, and from there to a generalized suspicion of institutions that generate inconvenient facts.

It is fashionable in some quarters to turn science itself into a referendum on identity, to inflate celebrity crusades against vaccines into a broader suspicion of medicine, to flatten epidemiology into censorship and climate records into plot. And once that habit forms, it spreads outward. This has made it easier to suggest that an observatory is a vanity, that a physics question is a drain, that a space telescope is an extravagance, although the plain historical fact is that science IS what made America GREAT. The wartime radar, postwar semiconductors, modern composites, weather modeling, satellite navigation, and the entire digital economy grew from patient public investments.

The cautionary tale that hides in plain sight, is in the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He organized the most consequential scientific project of the twentieth century, helped end one catastrophe and arguably forestalled another, then became the target of a loyalty spectacle that chilled a generation. It took the Department of Energy almost seventy years to vacate that stain, which is to say that United States institutions can eventually correct their own injustices. Though, not before they leave a dent in the culture that tells young people to keep their heads down rather than their eyes up.

If you want a physicist’s metaphor that is more than a parlor trick, think of Schrödinger’s cat. This is a reminder that uncertainty rules until you choose, and multiple futures remain plausible until you open the box. But, once you do, you inherit the future your prior actions made likely. A nation that repeatedly narrows the aperture of its scientific ambition should not feign shock when it finds a diminished future inside. For the wave function collapses toward the outcomes it funds.

There is a second metaphor, less elegant and more American, which is simply the map, the one Lewis and Clark carried as a blank and that NASA has been filling in. With pictures of distant worlds, the rising lines of seas, the changing patterns of snowpack and soil moisture, the storms whose tracks and intensities now appear in forecasts sharp enough to empty a beach before the surge arrives…To decide that such mapping can be safely trimmed is to say that the cost of a satellite exceeds the value of a town saved, which no mayor believes when the sky turns green.

Private launches have transformed access to orbit, small satellites have exploded in number and capability, on-orbit servicing and in-space manufacturing may soon make new things possible. Yet, none of these commercial achievements erase the need for a public explorer that asks questions whose utility is not immediate profit, keeps archives no company will maintain at its own expense, and speaks to the enduring civic project of a country that once defined itself by what it chose to learn.

Those who favor the proposed cuts will say that hard choices are the price of seriousness, that priorities must be set, that every agency must live within its means. But, seriousness begins with scale and the honesty to admit that trimming extended missions saves pennies and sacrifices institutions.  Shrinking the workforce by nearly a third is not an efficiency but an amputation, and the rhetoric of doing more with less becomes a euphemism for doing less while pretending otherwise.

Beyond slogans and press releases that applaud the sun while pulling the shades, it would begin by protecting the extended missions that are still producing frontier science, because they are the best return on investment in the federal portfolio. 

I know there is a temptation, especially among those who did not grow up under the spell of Saturn’s rings or the Pillars of Creation, to classify all of this as sentimentality, as pretty pictures in an age of brittle budgets, yet sentiment is not the argument here. The argument is that the practical and the poetic are twinned in science. The same laboratory discipline that keeps a spacecraft alive at Jupiter, teaches a graduate student to design fault-tolerant systems that may, one day, keep a hospital running through a blackout. The same cryogenic engineering that lets a space telescope see the first galaxies being born, also improves cancer imaging, and the same climate records that fuel policy also save farms and cities.

There is a quieter, more personal claim I will not apologize for making, which is that a nation is healthier when its young are permitted a credible path to lives of patient inquiry. To walk out of a planetarium with a ten-year-old and be able to say “those employees are people not so different from you” or “you can do it too”, means to provide a civic promise as well as a private dream. And that promise becomes hollow if the institutions that make it true are treated as ornaments.

Congress can still choose a larger future. It can insist that the United States remain a place where the great experiments are not only imagined but sustained. It can remember that the wars they won and the markets they built are owed to laboratories, field stations, test ranges, and a national habit of giving our best minds a long leash.

What gets measured gets managed, the management gurus like to say. But, I would say that, what we refuse to fund we quietly decide not to become. In the largest sky we have ever photographed, with instruments our grandparents would have called magic, it would be a small tragedy to open the box on our future and discover that we chose, with eyes open, to make it smaller.

We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space.

To me, this line has always sounded like a shrug dressed up as wisdom, a way of making peace with small ambitions by pretending chronology has conspired against us. When, in truth, the calendar is not the author of our horizons. The distance between a closed door and an open one is often no more than a budget vote, a hiring plan, and the stubborn choice to keep asking questions whose answers do not fit inside an election cycle.

If the generation that welcomed Einstein and set Oppenheimer to work had indulged the same fatalism, we would have neither the language of the cosmos that telescopes have given us, nor the power of the atom that laboratories unlocked. And we would have learned far less about ourselves, because every serious investment in discovery is also an investment in the kind of country that believes it still has something to contribute.

We are only “too early” or “too late” if we decide to be, and the moment we stop confusing austerity for prudence and treat science as infrastructure, wonderful things happen. Artemis stops being a slide in a presentation and becomes a ship on a pad, New Horizons becomes a reminder that we built instruments that sailed past Pluto and kept going, and a new accelerator in American soil returns from the realm of nostalgia to the realm of engineering drawings, contracts and apprenticeships.

In 2013, I crossed the ocean and saw the United States with my own eyes, a place that had felt familiar to me long before my plane touched down, because I had already walked its streets in my imagination. The first visit did not answer every question, it rarely does. But, I returned home certain of two facts: that the child who papered a room with stars had not grown out of that habit of looking up, and that the country that once made room for the world’s dreamers still had the capacity to do so. If it chose.

So let us retire the quote and keep the urgency, because the work ahead is not to wait for history to deliver us a more flattering century, it is to build one. And the tools are already in our hands: laboratories that need refitting, missions that need rescuing, young scientists who need a reason to believe their country will not ask them to choose between doing good work and keeping their voice.

If we choose to act, the children who paper their walls with rockets and star charts will not grow up feeling stranded between eras. They will grow up in the one where the United States decided, once again, that exploring the universe was not a metaphor for national character but its expression. That THIS is what can Make America Great Again.

Open the box wisely. Keep the missions that work working. Give the next Einstein a reason to unpack here, the next Oppenheimer a reason to organize here, and the next generation a map that still has room for their names.

By I. Constantin

Credit: Photo from the author’s private collection