Enlarge / John Grunsfeld, then the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, speaks at a Mars conference in October, 2015.

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission has always been a bit of an ugly duckling. It was not out of love that the space agency came up with the plan to scoop a small boulder off the surface of an asteroid and bring it back to a location near the Moon. Rather, after President Obama’s call to have humans visit an asteroid in the mid-2020s, this was the only way NASA could afford to meet such a mandate.

Since the mission’s formulation, Congress has generally dismissed sending astronauts to fly formation with a small boulder around the Moon as a stunt. Many planetary scientists, too, have never really embraced the plan, uncertain of its value when NASA already was flying a robotic sample return mission to an asteroid, OSIRIS-REx.

The aerospace community generally believes the Trump administration will sweep aside the asteroid mission in the coming months. Further confirmation of this came in late November from House Science Committee chairman and Trump ally Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden asking critical questions about the mission, claiming it was “thrust upon NASA,” by the Obama administration and supported by “farcical studies.”