defended his hopes for funding, mainly through promises to spend his own personal fortune to fund projects like the threatened Chandra X-ray Observatory, a powerful X-ray telescope, which he has deemed of key importance to scientific discovery. He has also claimed this week that some budget cut plans from a leaked document called Project Athena, which he wrote at the end of last year, were no longer relevant to his current plans. The Project Athena Proposal, despite its obfuscated relevance to Isaacman’s current plans for the agency, was not aligned with the downsizing goals of the administration at large. In this proposal, Mars research and nuclear electric propulsion were both subject