It’s difficult to predict what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for the future of NASA. The newly elected commander in chief has said very little about his space policy plans throughout the course of his campaign. But Trump’s space advisors have made some things clear: they want the space program to focus more on human deep space exploration and less on researching the Earth and climate science. And the private spaceflight industry will continue to play a significant role in space policy moving forward.

""NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities.""

These insights into Trump’s space policy come from a recent op-ed in Space News, written by Robert S. Walker, former chairman of the House Science Committee and a likely member of Trump’s NASA transition team, and Peter Navarro, an economist and public policy expert. "NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies," the two wrote. "Human exploration of our entire Solar System by the end of this century should be NASA’s focus and goal."

Walker, who wrote Trump’s proposed space policy, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association should take over all of NASA’s satellite missions that are used to research Earth and its climate. "The science that is being doing is essentially Earth-based science," Walker tells The Verge. "It relates to weather; it relates to Earth-based needs. And so NOAA is probably a more appropriate place for that to be done." The goal is to free up funds for more NASA human exploration missions into deep space, Walker says.

This policy move could completely rearrange NASA’s Earth Science division, which has seen a relatively steady increase in funding under the Obama administration. NASA received $1.921 billion for its Earth Science division for fiscal year 2016, up from $1.5 billion in 2009. However, there are no known plans to increase funding to NOAA for this transition. Over the past eight years, NASA has launched a series of key Earth-observing satellites, such as the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCVR) and the Jason satellites, which have gathered valuable data about Earth’s climate, space weather, sea level changes, and more.

Some of NASA's Earth Science satellites. (NASA)

Whether or not Trump will completely slash NASA’s Earth Science division is unknown, but it’s not impossible. The president and Congress work together to decide NASA’s budget, and Republicans control both the House and the Senate now. "They’re not going to be able to cut Earth Science by a billion and use that for exploration," Jim Muncy, founder of PoliSpace, a space policy consulting agency, tells The Verge. "But with the Republicans in the Senate and the House, we haven’t had undivided government like this since the beginning of Obama."

"Strong public-private partnerships will continue"

It seems there will be some alignment with Obama’s NASA, though. Perhaps the biggest focus of NASA during the Obama administration has been public-private partnerships — initiatives in which NASA has partnered with commercial companies to fulfill one of the agency’s exploration needs. The most prominent of these partnerships have been the Commercial Crew and Cargo Programs, through which commercial launch providers like SpaceX are tasked with ferrying people and cargo to and from the International Space Station. Walker and Navarro made it clear that strong public-private partnerships will continue, and that they will seek to turn the International Space Station into a "quasi-public facility" — something NASA has expressed interest in doing for some time.