NASA's AXIS Telescope Project Cancelled After Budget Cuts and Staff Departures

Christopher Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, spent nearly a decade developing the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS), a $1 billion orbiting observatory designed to study the early universe, including the formation of the first black holes and galaxies. In October 2024, Reynolds's team received a $5 million grant from NASA to refine their innovative approach using single-crystal silicon x-ray mirrors, partnering with engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. However, the project's trajectory dramatically shifted in mid-2025 when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiated a broad package of buyouts and early retirements at NASA. Nearly 4,000 NASA employees—approximately one-fifth of the agency's workforce—departed, including 20 members of Reynolds's AXIS team. Critical personnel were lost, including the engineer designing the mirror heaters, the lead project manager, and William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope's mirror technology. "We were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they'd done," Reynolds recalled.

The crisis deepened when President Donald Trump's budget proposal included massive cuts to science funding, with the program that would have funded AXIS zeroed out entirely. NASA leadership quickly realigned priorities to match the president's budget request, reassigning Goddard engineers away from AXIS to projects more likely to receive congressional funding. This delay prevented Reynolds's team from sharing their design with cost analysts and schedulers until mid-September 2025—by which point their first cost estimate showed the project was 10 percent over budget. The team attempted to find cuts, but a federal government shutdown in October 2025 brought all work to a halt. When operations resumed in mid-November, Reynolds had only two weeks to bring the project in on budget, a task the team ultimately failed to accomplish.

After nearly a decade of work, NASA headquarters rejected the AXIS proposal, effectively cancelling the mission. Reynolds describes the termination as a form of attrition rather than direct cancellation: "We were never canceled. We were just starved to death." While Reynolds himself, as a tenured professor, has other research to pursue, he emphasizes the broader impact: the lost positions represent future career opportunities, and the termination threatens U.S. leadership in an entire field of astronomical research. The AXIS project's collapse reflects a wider pattern affecting the American scientific community, with thousands of federal research grants frozen and countless scientists facing similar circumstances across the country.