Aging infrastructure, short-term thinking, and ambitions that far outstrip its funding are just a few of the problems threatening the future of America’s vaunted civil space agency, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In a report commissioned by Congress and released this week, experts said that a number of the agency’s technological resources are suffering, including the Deep Space Network — an international collection of giant radio antennas that is overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

Report authors warned that NASA has, for too long, prioritized near-term missions at the cost of long-term investments in its infrastructure, workforce and technology.

“The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization’s greatness in the first place and that underpin its future potential,” the report said.

The choice facing the agency is stark, lead author Norman Augustine said Tuesday: Either the U.S. must increase funding for NASA, or the agency must cut some missions.

“For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Augustine, a former executive at Lockheed Martin. “The concerns it faces are ones that have built up over decades.”

Even as society at large has become exponentially more reliant on technology in the 60 years since NASA’s founding, federal investment in research and development has declined significantly over the decades, the study said.

This has been felt acutely at NASA, whose funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has plummeted from its Apollo-era high and remained essentially flat for decades.

NASA’s budget for years has hovered around 0.1% of total U.S. gross domestic product — less than one-eighth of its allowance during the mid-1960s.

Within the space agency, the report noted, science and technology funding has remained at a constant percentage within the budget even as missions have become far more costly and complicated.

As a result, NASA centers have only “low- to moderate-level efforts” underway to study emerging technologies that in a previous era might have been pioneered at the agency.

“NASA is a strong organization today, but it has underfunded the future NASA,” Augustine said.

The centers include JPL, where the report committee interviewed staffers at all levels of the organization.

JPL referred requests for comment to NASA.

“This report aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement provided by the agency. “We will continue to work diligently to address the committee’s recommendations — and drive our cutting-edge work on Earth, in the skies, and in the stars.”

Another key problem the report identified is neglect of NASA’s facilities, 83% of which have exceeded their designed life span. Attempts to repair and improve the agency’s infrastructure are stifled by a rule requiring a lengthy and labor-intensive review process for all requests over $1 million, a figure that has not changed since the rule’s inception despite a 30% increase in costs from inflation.

Employees at JPL in particular voiced concerns about this restriction, the report noted.

As a key example of a facility whose funding has failed to keep up with its increasing demands, the report highlighted the Deep Space Network, which makes up the world’s largest scientific telecommunications system.

JPL manages the network’s three terrestrial sites in Goldstone, Calif.; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid. The network’s budget has declined from $250 million in 2010 to roughly $200 million today, even as demands on it have increased.

As a result, the overburdened network has been forced to make costly compromises. During the Artemis I mission in late 2022, the lunar mission elbowed out all other scientific uses of the network, costing more than $21 million in data transmission from the James Webb Space Telescope alone.

The situation on the ground is not much better, the report noted. Basic infrastructure such as roads and pipes are failing at the sites, and their workforce is spread dangerously thin. Necessary maintenance and hiring would cost an estimated $45 million per year for the next 10 years, the authors wrote.

“This report is a wake-up call for NASA and political leaders,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society. “It identifies critical systemic issues that are already threatening NASA’s ability to pursue its ambitious program in exploration and science, issues that have been felt but not quantified until now. We have a 20th century infrastructure for a 21st century space program.”

Peter Neff understands the allure of the world’s fifth-largest continent.

The camera roll on his phone is brimming with videos and photos of his trips to Antarctica, where the glaciologist and climate scientist has spent days and weeks at a time collecting ice core samples. His work helps develop a record of past climate conditions and anticipate what’s to come.

When the pandemic lockdowns started to keep everyone at home, Neff, a professor at the University of Minnesota, upped his social media presence by posting explanations of his work online under the username “Icy Pete.” He reposted a video to TikTok that had done well on X, which captures the sound a chunk of ice makes when it falls 90 meters down a borehole (“Pew!” Just like the sound of a gunshot in a cartoon). It was an immediate success, garnering more than 30,000 views.

A view of the sloping iceberg in Antarctica in February. Scientists like glaciologist Peter Neff are focusing on mapping changes in Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets.

(Sebnem Coskun / Anadolu / Getty Images)

Advertisement

In 2024 (and 2022), Neff was featured as a Climate Creator to Watch, a collaboration between startup media Pique Action and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and his posts had gained more than 4 million likes.

“As a scientist, my job is to tell folks what the situation is and what we could choose to do to not make it worse, or to make it better,” Neff said in an interview. “I hope I can provide information that is accurately used to describe the challenges that we face, because it is quite serious.”

As the internet accommodates a growing range of voices, scientists studying climate and the environment have taken to sharing their work online, translating obscure topics and discoveries into accessible bits of information. Instead of waiting years for their studies and work to be published in academic journals, scientists like Neff have used social media to extend their reach — and their brand.

Joe Hanson, the biologist who hosts PBS’ “Be Smart” series, is a well-known voice on climate issues on YouTube. One 44-second video explaining the Keeling curve (a daily record of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration) has 2.4 million views. His 28-minute video tackling climate change myths has been viewed more than 900,000 times. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has an authoritative presence on Instagram and partners with influencers to spread the gospel of climate science. Peter Kalmus took the internet by storm in 2022 when he and other scientists chained himself to the door of the J.P. Morgan Chase office building in downtown Los Angeles to protest the company’s fossil fuel investments and were subsequently arrested. On X, his “ClimateHuman” account has more than 330,000 followers.

The potential to attract likes is enormous. According to the Pew Research Center, one survey found about half of U.S. adults said they reported seeing news at least “sometimes” while using social media platforms.

Neff has studied glaciology for 15 years and has traveled several times to the Antarctic region to study ice cores — cylinders of drilled ice that serve as records of past climate change and are extracted from ice sheets and glaciers. Among his many titles, he is the director of field research and data for the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration.

Katharine Hayhoe at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022. Hayhoe has an authoritative presence on Instagram and partners with influencers to share climate science.

(Nariman El-Mofty / Associated Press)

On TikTok, Neff explains the process of “how to go from old air in ice to an air sample” in 60 seconds. While an academic journal entry might take on more scientific terms and explanations, Neff breaks down the process of his work with ice cores in layman’s terms, rushing through the narration — “drill your ice core borehole,” “load ice in the vacuum chamber,” “melt that ice” — in a matter-of-fact voice for a video that has more than 617,000 views as of this writing.

Neff’s TikTok account had 224,000 followers, and a graduate student and fellow Antarctica scientist, Austin Carter, who also posts about their work through the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, has eclipsed him with nearly 254,000 followers.

According to a study published in January by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that monitors online hate speech, climate denialism has shifted from denying global warming is happening to claiming climate solutions won’t work and that the climate movement is unreliable across all platforms. (The study, which reviewed about 12,000 videos using artificial intelligence, also found that YouTube makes up to $13.4 million “from channels posting denial.”)

Neff has some unkind words for climate deniers. At one point, he deleted a video that showed sun halos in Antarctica because it had gone viral among “flat Earthers” who were trying to use the video as proof that the world is not, in fact, round.

“These people are brick walls … and you’re not going to change anybody’s mind,” he said. “You don’t know what people are going to do with your content once you post it.”

The climatologist stresses the role scientists can play in spreading fact-based information.

“I’m trying to just educate people … especially with all of our work being publicly funded,” Neff said. “We’re obligated to share about it.”

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, took a different path to social media stardom. As the former executive director of the La Jolla-based Waitt Institute, which implements sustainable ocean plans and policy, she led communication efforts to make sure Barbudan fishing communities had input in proposing policy. She began running Facebook pages for the effort, and found she had a knack for communicating her work to the public. Next, she began blogging for National Geographic and writing freelance stories.

Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson speaks onstage during a NYC Climate Strike rally and demonstration at Battery Park in 2019.

(Ron Adar / SOPA Images/Sipa USA /Associated Press)

“To me, all of climate, environmental communication is about how can we repeat each other’s successes and avoid others’ failures,” said Johnson, who has studied marine biology for about 12 years. “So that requires getting in the weeds a little and hopefully, in a way that’s appealing and welcoming as opposed to like, boring and insufferable.”

Johnson has acquired her expertise through many endeavors. She’s the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College, a co-founder of the think tank Urban Ocean Lab and the All We Can Save Project, both of which promote sustainable marine and climate solutions. This month, Johnson will release her book “What if We Get it Right?” which features conversations with farmers, climate activists and financiers — among others — in an effort to map out possible climate futures. In addition, she appears in several publications and platforms in an effort to convince the general public that there is still hope in avoiding climate catastrophe.

On TikTok, where she does not have an account, a snippet from one of her Ted Talks with five facts about parrotfish has more than 400,000 views. Johnson is often featured on podcasts as a guest to talk about ocean conservation, and followers share her climate action Venn diagram to inspire action and defeat hopelessness.

She gained a big chunk of her followers in 2020, after the Washington Post published her op-ed that tackled climate policy and racism. The content she posts under her name is personal and conversational (she has more than 120,000 followers on Instagram) but the organizations that she runs stick to policy-driven posts.

Conversations among members of the public, scientists and policymakers are all part of working toward a climate solution, Johnson said. “That is really at the heart of the way I attempt to share information, is not by me being out there just like screaming into the void as one person but by trying to make this a collective conversation.”

For now, Johnson said she will continue her “begrudging” relationship with social media and continue to be a voice that people can rely on when it comes to climate policy ahead of the November presidential election, and even local races, which have a direct impact on voters.

“There’s an intense amnesia in the United States about the Trump administration, and how awful that was for the environment,” she said, citing the hundreds of environmental regulations on clean air and water that he rolled back. “I just really want to do my little part in helping people understand how to be a climate voter. The people who follow me care about this issue, but it’s really hard to get good information from a person that you trust.”

Roughly half of Americans subscribe to to some sort of conspiracy theory, and their fellow humans haven’t had much success coaxing them out of their rabbit holes.

Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from an AI-powered chatbot.

In a series of experiments, the artificial chatbot was able to make more than a quarter of people feel uncertain about their most cherished conspiracy belief. The average conversation lasted less than 8½ minutes.

The results were reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The failure of facts to convince people that we really did land on the moon, that Al Qaeda really was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and that President Biden really did win the 2020 election, among other things, has fueled anxiety about a post-truth era that favors personal beliefs over objective evidence.

“People who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their mind,” said study leader Thomas Costello, a psychologist at American University who investigates political and social beliefs. “In some sense, it feels better to believe that there’s a secret society controlling everything than believing that entropy and chaos rule.”

But the study suggests the problem isn’t with the persuasive power of facts — it’s our inability to marshal the right combination of facts to counter someone’s specific reasons for skepticism.

Costello and his colleagues attributed the chatbot’s success to the detailed, customized arguments it prepared for each of the 2,190 study participants it engaged with.

For instance, a person who doubted that the twin towers could have been brought down by airplanes because jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel was informed that the fuel reaches temperatures as high as 1,832 degrees, enough for steel to lose its structural integrity and trigger a collapse.

A person who didn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald had the skills to assassinate President John F. Kennedy was told that Oswald had been a sharpshooter in the Marines and wouldn’t have had much trouble firing an accurate shot from about 90 yards away.

And a person who believed Princess Diana was killed so Prince Charles could remarry was reminded of the 8-year gap between Diana’s fatal car accident and the future king’s second wedding, undermining the argument that the two events were related.

The findings suggest that “any type of belief that people hold that is not based in good evidence could be shifted,” said study co-author Gordon Pennycook, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University.

“It’s really validating to know that evidence does matter,” he said.

The researchers began by asking Americans to rate the degree to which they subscribed to 15 common conspiracy theories, including that the virus responsible for COVID-19 was created by the Chinese government and that the U.S. military has been hiding evidence of a UFO landing in Roswell, N.M. After performing an unrelated task, participants were asked to describe a conspiracy theory they found particularly compelling and explain why they believed it.

The request prompted 72% of them to share their feelings about a conspiracy theory. Among this group, 60% were randomly assigned to discuss it with the large language model GPT-4 Turbo.

The conversations began with the chatbot summarizing the human’s description of the conspiracy theory. Then the human rated the degree to which he or she agreed with the summary on a scale from 0 to 100.

From there, the chatbot set about making the case that there was nothing fishy going on. To make sure it wasn’t stretching the truth in order to be more persuasive, the researchers hired a professional fact-checker to evaluate 128 of the bot’s claims about a variety of conspiracies. One was judged to be misleading, and the rest were true.

The bot also turned up the charm. In one case, it praised a participant for “critically examining historical events” while reminding them that “it’s vital to distinguish between what could theoretically be possible and what is supported by evidence.”

Each conversation included three rounds of evidence from the chatbot, followed by a response from the human. (You can try it yourself here.) Afterward, the participants revisited their summarized conspiracy statements. Their ratings of agreement dropped by an average of 21%.

In 27% of cases, the drop was large enough for the researchers to say the person “became uncertain of their conspiracy belief.”

Meanwhile, the 40% of participants who served as controls also got summaries of their preferred conspiracy theory and scored them on the 0-to-100 scale. Then they talked with the chatbot about neutral topics, like the U.S. medical system or the relative merits of cats and dogs. When these people were asked to reconsider their conspiracy theory summaries, their ratings fell by just 1%, on average.

The researchers checked in with people 10 days and 2 months later to see if the effects had worn off. They hadn’t.

The team repeated the experiment with another group and asked people about their conspiracy-theory beliefs in a more roundabout way. This time, discussing their chosen theory with the bot prompted a 19.4% decrease in their rating, compared with a 2.9% decrease for those who chatted about something else.

The conversations “really fundamentally changed people’s minds,” said co-author David Rand, a computational social scientist at MIT who studies how people make decisions.

“The effect didn’t vary significantly based on which conspiracy was named and discussed,” Rand said. “It worked for classic conspiracies like the JFK assassination and moon landing hoaxes and Illuminati, stuff like that. And it also worked for modern, more politicized conspiracies like those involving 2020 election fraud or COVID-19.”

What’s more, being challenged by the AI chatbot about one conspiracy theory prompted people to become more skeptical about others. After their conversations, their affinity for the 15 common theories fell significantly more than it did for people in the control group.

“It was making people less generally conspiratorial,” Rand said. “It also increased their intentions to do things like ignore or block social media accounts sharing conspiracies, or, you know, argue with people who are espousing those conspiracy theories.”

In another encouraging sign, the bot was unable to talk people out of beliefs in conspiracies that were actually true, such as the CIA’s covert MK-Ultra project that used unwitting subjects to test whether drugs, torture or brainwashing could enhance interrogations. In some cases, the chatbot discussions made people believe these conspiracies even more.

“It wasn’t like mind control, just, you know, making people do whatever it wants,” Rand said. “It was essentially following facts.”

Researchers who weren’t involved in the study called it a welcome advance.

In an essay that accompanied the study, psychologist Bence Bago of Tilberg University in the Netherlands and cognitive psychologist Jean-Francois Bonnefon of the Toulouse School of Economics in France said the experiments show that “a scalable intervention to recalibrate misinformed beliefs may be within reach.”

But they also raised several concerns, including whether it would work on a conspiracy theory that’s so new there aren’t many facts for an AI bot to draw from.

The researchers took a first pass at testing this the week after the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Trump. After helping the AI program find credible information about the attack, they found that talking with the chatbot reduced people’s belief in assassination-related conspiracy theories by 6 or 7 percentage points, which Costello called “a noticeable effect.”

Bago and Bonnefon also questioned whether conspiracy theorists would be willing to engage with a bot. Rand said he didn’t think that would be an insurmountable problem.

“One thing that’s an advantage here is that conspiracy theorists often aren’t embarrassed about their beliefs,” he said. “You could imagine just going to conspiracy forums and inviting people to do their own research by talking to the chatbot.”

Rand also suggested buying ads on search engines so that when someone types a query about, say, the “deep state,” they’ll see an invitation to discuss it with an AI chatbot.

Robbie Sutton, a social psychologist at the University of Kent in England who studies why people embrace conspiracy beliefs, called the new work “an important step forward.” But he noted that most people in the study persisted in their beliefs despite receiving “high-quality, factual rebuttals” from a “highly competent and respectful chatbot.”

“Seen this way, there is more resistance than there is open-mindedness,” he said.

Sutton added that the findings don’t shed much light on what draws people to conspiracy theories in the first place.

“Interventions like this are essentially an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff,” he said. “We need to focus more of our efforts on what happens at the top of the cliff.”