President Donald Trump’s NASA budget plans look to cut its public relations funding by half, but already the agency is shuttering social media accounts that include those dedicated to popular missions including Mars Curiosity, Mars Perseverance and Voyager.

Those three in particular have quite the fanbase on X with Curiosity’s account touting more than 4 million followers, Perseverance and its little flying buddy Ingenuity have more than 2.9 million followers and Voyager nearly 900,000.

The X handles for the robotic missions have taken whimsical approaches to posting over the years. And after NASA announced Monday the planned consolidation of accounts, prompting an outpouring of support online, each posted thankful responses.

“Wow, thank you all for the supportive messages. I may be a robot, but I felt every bit of love,” reads a post from @MarsCuriosity, the account created in 2008 on what was then Twitter ahead of its 2011 launch from Cape Canaveral and 2012 landing on Mars. “Every single one of you has made this curious journey even more meaningful. This account isn’t archived just yet — so stick around for some highlights these next few weeks.”

The account for @NASAPersevere, created in 2020 for the mission that launched that year and landed on Mars in 2021, posted a “Thank you” with a heart emoji and said, “All of your supportive words are more meaningful to me than ones and zeroes could ever be. My work on Mars continues, and while this account will soon be archived, I’m going to share a few mission highlights before signing off.”

The account for @NASAVoyager, created in 2010 for the nearly 50-year-old mission, posted, “Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support after yesterday’s announcement that this account will be archived in coming weeks. Until then, we’d love to take you on a trip down memory lane and highlight some of our grand adventures and discoveries. Sound OK to you?”

Another mission-specific account to hear the death knell is for New Horizons, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and is now traveling through the Kuiper Belt. It’s one of several active missions the proposed Trump budget looks to shut down. It similarly posted a farewell message @NASANewHorizons and like the others asks followers to look for updates on other NASA accounts that remain active.

They are among the most popular accounts as NASA streamlines its message, according to the agency announcement.

Some social media accounts shuttering include NASA’s Launch Services Program (@NASA_LSP) and Exploration Ground Systems (@nasagroundsys) based at Kennedy Space Center.

Also being consolidated are Orion (@NASA_Orion), Space Launch System (@NASA_SLS) and Gateway lunar station (@NASA_Gateway) accounts under the Artemis program.

Others shuttering include ones dedicated to NASA’s astronaut corps (@NASA_Astronauts), climate missions (@nasaclimate), the Commercial Crew Program (@Commercial_Crew), moon science (@NASAMoon) and atmosphere research (@NASAAtmosphere) among others.

“Over time, NASA’s social media footprint has expanded considerably, growing to over 400 individual accounts across 15 platforms,” the agency posted. “While this allowed for highly specialized updates, it also created a fragmented digital landscape that was challenging for both the public to navigate and for NASA to manage efficiently.”

NASA will still give updates to the missions, but just on broader channels. So many will be deactivated, while some will merge and in a few cases some will be rebranded.

The move is a precursor to plans to centralize communications in its headquarters and eliminate those at its nine space centers, including Kennedy Space Center, according to Trump’s proposed 2026 budget.

“Beginning in FY 2026, the Office of Communications will restructure the organization to an Agency or centralized structure vs Center-specific to eliminate functions not statutorily mandated, except functions the Agency deems necessary, consolidate management layers and duplicative functions, and evaluate/implement technological solutions that automate routine tasks,” reads the proposal.

The 2024 budget funded the Office of Communications with $76.2 million of the NASA’s nearly $25 billion. The 2026 spending plan drops that to $33.8 million of the agency’s $18.8 billion. That includes eliminating $7.8 million for KSC — the most of any space center’s public relations budgets.

The shuttering of individual accounts is part of a plan for a more uniform message, NASA stated, citing the 1958 law creating the agency that required the “widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof.”

“The 2025 social media consolidation project is designed to fulfill this mandate more effectively. By reducing the number of agency accounts, NASA seeks to make its work more accessible to the public, avoiding the potential for oversaturation or confusion that can arise from numerous social media accounts bearing the NASA name and insignia,” it stated.

Aside from fans who bemoaned losing the popular accounts, the change in approach has critics — including Jonathan McDowell. The British-American astronomer and astrophysicist works at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Chandra X-ray Center.

“So @NASA is consolidating media accounts for ‘consistent messaging’. Which is bad the same way every cafe in town being a Starbucks forcing a consistent menu on you is bad. Much less chance of something interesting to *your* taste but not to HQ making it into the public domain,” McDowell posted on X. “In my view the core strength of social media is letting individual voices and their quirks find their individual audiences. Making a bland uniform corporate account to replace individual @NASA voices is a mistake.”

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