GoKawiilThis article is part of “ The Young American Scientists ,” which includes stories of 28 extraordinary scientists poised to change the world, as well as a deep look at the past, present and future of science and innovation in the U.S.
Last year Christopher Reynolds started to worry that his space telescope was going to be killed.
The mission had started taking shape nine years earlier, a billion-dollar orbiting observatory that would look back in time into the early universe to study the first black holes, the formation of galaxies, and more. Eight teams of researchers pitched NASA their ideas; Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was part of a group that wanted to deploy a new technology: x-ray mirrors made of single-crystal silicon. It sounded promising enough that in October 2024 Reynolds’s group got a $5-million grant from the agency to refine the idea—the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite, or AXIS. The scientists teamed up with spacecraft builders at the nasa Goddard Space Flight Center. “Everything seemed to be going pretty well,” Reynolds says. “And then we started to get hit by programmatic chaos.”
Last June the budget hawks in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed NASA into offering a broad package of buyouts, paid leave and early retirement. Over the next few weeks nearly 4,000 NASA employees—about a fifth of the workforce—took the deal. Reynolds’s AXIS team lost 20 people. The engineer designing the heaters to keep the x-ray mirror at a constant temperature: gone. The lead project manager: gone. William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope’s mirror technology: gone. “We were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they’d done and where we were with aspects of the design,” Reynolds says.
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Around the same time President Donald Trump’s budget proposal came out—with massive cuts to science funding. In the U.S., private money funds vast amounts of scientific development research, and philanthropy contributes a bit, but something like 40 percent of all the funding for basic, blue-sky, exploratory research comes from the federal government. The program that would have funded AXIS was zeroed out entirely.
That was just the request, Reynolds figured at the time; Congress still has to do the actual appropriation. “In any normal year, that’s what would have happened,” he says. “But the center leadership started quite quickly aligning their priorities to the president’s budget request.”
Goddard reassigned engineers to projects that would be funded if Congress approved the budget as written. Reynolds’s team lost its systems engineers, which in turn delayed sharing of AXIS’s proposed design with Goddard’s cost analysts and schedule specialists. “We got our very first cost estimate in the middle of September 2025,” Reynolds says. “We were 10 percent over budget.” He started trying to find things to cut. But then, in October, the federal government shut down. “The whole center just stopped,” he says. “Everything stopped.”
When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead.
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