As Congress debates NASA’s 2026 budget, two small but mighty satellites hang in limbo: the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, specifically OCO-2 and OCO-3. Tasked with tracking carbon dioxide and plant growth globally, they are now at risk of decommissioning due to demands from the White House.
Shutting these down would jeopardize information needed for agriculture, earth science and nascent work to rapidly reduce carbon dioxide levels and restore a safe climate for our children.
The value of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions is enormous.
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These satellites do what ground stations cannot: supply continuous, global data on carbon dioxide levels, which fluctuate continuously. Insights from these OCO satellites inform the everyday decisions of farmers, energy companies, insurance underwriters and infrastructure planners who rely on precise information about our planet’s changing atmosphere.
Disabling or deorbiting these unique tools would have ripple effects throughout the economy. Agriculture, aquaculture, construction and national defense all face more risk and uncertainty without timely, reliable atmospheric data.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, appointed by Trump in July, said that NASA’s climate and earth science will “move aside” as the agency refocuses solely on space exploration according to The Hill.
But ending the OCO missions would also diminish our global leadership in remote sensing. Global competitors are eager to gain an advantage by advancing their own satellite technologies if we abandon our edge.
Why make it so easy for them?
In case food security, drought prediction, defense and leadership are not reason enough to continue operating the OCOs, consider that the data they provide could actually help us restore a safe climate. While not yet widely known, we already possess nature’s know-how to restore conditions that enabled humanity to thrive for thousands of years.
We have the opportunity to restore safe, pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels by mid-century. Doing so will require removing the excess CO2 pumped into the atmosphere over the last 250 years — an impossible-sounding trillion tons of it. Yet we know it can be done, since nature has removed that much, many times during the last million years.
We learned, last century, that pulling atmospheric carbon down into the ocean was key to dropping temperatures before ice ages. We have also learned that boosting photosynthesis in the ocean was a major cause of this large-scale carbon dioxide removal. Groups around the world are now following nature’s lead and preparing to do the same. And no, we won’t go into an ice age — just restore the climate that enabled humanity and the ecosystems we depend on to thrive.
But to make safe, natural-process CO2-removal a reality we need to have accurate, low-cost and regular measurement of carbon dioxide levels around the world. Ground-level sensors for CO2 are too costly to implement at scale globally.
Losing these satellites would blind us to essential data for many critical industries — and make it nearly impossible to demonstrate and optimize the CO2-removal approaches we need to restore a historically safe climate for humanity.
Whether portrayed as a money-saving measure or as part of a strategy to shift refocus away from Earth science, dropping the OCOs would be short-sighted in the extreme.
There’s still hope. It takes a relative pittance in Federal terms — $15 million a year — to keep the satellites going. Efforts are afoot to secure new uses for the OCO data, and partnerships between NASA and industry could conceivably pay this bill.
In the meantime, NASA should not be forced to take irreversible steps — like shutting down OCO-2, which would destroy it — until Congress completes the budget process.
Satellites provide essential information on the physical reality of our world. Our scientific edge, our food and economic security and an informed response to a changing environment all depend on satellites like OCO-2 and OCO-3.
Humanity wants Congress and NASA to keep them working for all of us.
Peter Fiekowsky, a Los Altos resident, is founder of the Foundation for Climate Restoration. Peter is a physicist and engineer who has worked at NASA and taught at MIT.