Finding Life on Mars

I’m late on sharing this one, but for The New Yorker, I describe a breakthrough in the search for Martian life—and how the Trump administration is killing a NASA mission that’s the culmination of fifty years of effort. A snippet:

There could be a way to prove that the Cheyava Falls rock contains signs of life: by studying it more closely than Perseverance is able to do. “If this is the most compelling potential biosignature on Mars, and it seems to be, logic dictates that NASA should go back with more missions, or bring that sample home for analysis,” Runyon said. Unfortunately, NASA is currently facing its own extinction-level event: the Trump Administration has recommended a budget that cuts the agency’s over-all federal funding by nearly a quarter, and essentially halves its spending on its science program. The proposal would also cancel the mission to return the samples to Earth. Duffy, a Trump appointee, seemed pleased during Wednesday’s announcement, but he is part of an Administration that would leave the bridge half built.

Read the rest here.

The V.A. is Not O.K.

For the New Yorker, I look at how the Trump Administration’s actions are undermining the Department of Veterans Affairs, and its promise to fire 75,000 V.A. employees risks destroying the system. I interviewed current and former V.A. employees, as well as veterans affected. Here is a snippet:

On March 5, 2025, Samantha Crowder sat in a corner of her bedroom which she’d turned into a home office, staring in disbelief at a leaked memo. The chief of staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs, where she’d worked for nearly a decade, had notified agency leaders that the V.A. would “aggressively” shrink its footprint. In partnership with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the memo said, the V.A. would “identify and eliminate waste” and “reduce management and bureaucracy.” This apparently meant firing about eighty thousand of the agency’s four hundred and eighty thousand workers.

After that, Crowder told me, meetings frequently devolved into discussions about the looming cuts. Her office paused work on a project to speed up the process for granting treatment privileges to new V.A. doctors; hiring was frozen and a number of job offers for doctors had been rescinded, so there was no one to bring on board. (Even after the Trump Administration reversed course on the offers, some doctors declined them.) Meanwhile, a stream of executive orders were affecting federal workers. A return-to-office mandate felt, to Crowder, like an accusation that she wasn’t doing her job from home. The V.A. had hired many people specifically to be remote workers, and the agency was short on desks. One of her colleagues was assigned to the back room of a local post office, and another was placed in the break room of a courthouse.

Read the rest here.

The Moon Base Mirage

Over at The Atlantic, I write about the looming, phenomenally stupid pivot by NASA away from Mars and toward the moon. A snippet:

American moon partisans owe a debt to Europe, which has tended the lunar flame during the ascent of Mars. Perhaps the most prominent moon advocate on Earth is Jan Woerner, the director general of the European Space Agency. Since assuming the post, he has argued persuasively that a “lunar village” is the natural successor to the aging International Space Station. It would be, in his view, a celestial point of harmony for a terrestrial species in discord. There is a problem, however: the Europeans have committed virtually no money to a moon village, and Russia, ESA's would-be partner in the venture, has no money to commit. They have already been forced to downsize their presence on the ISS due to costs, and have delayed plans for robotic exploration of the moon. (The head of the Russian space agency admits that Russia “does not have financial capabilities for advanced space projects.”) Lacking unity among member states, to say nothing of technology development and financial resources, what ESA really needs is for the United States to fund and spearhead such an effort. NASA's sights, however, are firmly fixed on Mars. With the presidential transition, however, and a new NASA director still to be appointed, lunar champions at home and abroad see an opportunity to abandon the Journey to Mars program and set sights a little closer to the Earth.

To that end, ESA is on a moon base public-relations offensive, from the light and easy (magazine spreads and aspirational illustrations) to bare-knuckled politics (publicly pressing the NASA administrator on the issue.) The overt message from Paris, where ESA is headquartered, is: We're doing this. The subtext is: While NASA plans a fantasy mission to Mars that will never happen, the rest of the world will be driving moon buggies and mining helium-3. But ESA’s campaign is powered by handwavium, and for all the illustrations of lunar domes and our great big blue marble over the horizon, progress on the moon base ends at Photoshop. If the U.S. doesn’t build the base, it won’t get built.

You can read the rest here.