Compounding concerns, the White House earlier this year proposed a sweeping 25% reduction to NASA’s overall budget — a move the Planetary Society described as the largest single-year cut in the agency’s history. The proposal raised fresh uncertainty about the future of planetary defense initiatives, including NEO Surveyor. Congress ultimately rejected most of the proposed reductions in January 2026, allowing the telescope project to remain funded and on track for a 2027–2028 launch window.
Despite the current limitations in defensive readiness, Fast sought to provide context and avoid unnecessary alarm. Small space rocks routinely enter Earth’s atmosphere and typically burn up harmlessly. Extremely large asteroids — those capable of triggering global mass extinctions like the object that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — are generally well tracked because their size makes them easier to detect.
The greatest vulnerability, she said, lies in the intermediate category.
“We’re not so much worried about the really large ones because we know where those are,” Fast said. “It’s the ones in between that could pose regional damage.”
