Americans who love the truth are watching the government’s space agency go quiet and they do not like it. Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb told Rob Finnerty on Newsmax that NASA has delayed releasing images people were promised, and ordinary Americans smell bureaucracy and secrecy the moment the cameras stop talking. When our tax dollars fund missions to Mars and beyond, the public has a right to prompt transparency, not radio silence.
The object at the center of this flap is the interstellar visitor known as 3I/ATLAS, a massive and unusual object that has puzzled a number of credible scientists because it does not behave like a garden-variety comet. Some researchers have documented anomalous features and taken the provocative step of asking whether portions of its motion and makeup are consistent with a technological origin — a question that should spark robust inquiry, not ridicule from the comfortable elites. The responsible response from any nation should be open data and vigorous scientific debate, not stonewalling.
Meanwhile, Europe’s space agency did what ours apparently could not: the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captured and released images of the object as it zipped past Mars, giving the public at least one clear window into what’s out there. Independent outlets and science outlets also flagged a Navcam image from NASA’s Perseverance rover, but reporting shows additional high-resolution data from NASA assets remain unreleased to the public. That discrepancy — European agencies publishing while parts of NASA go dark — raises legitimate questions about whom our government serves first.
The why behind the silence is painfully earthly: a federal budget shutdown beginning October 1, 2025 has furloughed many agency staffers and left communications channels thin or frozen, which is an avoidable political failure with real national-security implications. If bureaucratic staffing gaps are the reason our most sensitive cameras aren’t being shared promptly, then the finger of blame points squarely at career-destroying partisan fights in Washington that compromise American transparency. Citizens deserve better than budget brinkmanship that turns NASA into a blackout zone at the exact moment curiosity is highest.
It is refreshing and necessary that voices like Dr. Loeb’s — willing to challenge consensus and demand the data — are standing up and asking the hard questions on national TV instead of whispering them in academic journals. Whether you agree with his estimate that there’s a nontrivial chance the object could be technological or not, the point is simple: scientific skepticism and public accountability go hand in hand, and anyone who tries to shut that down is playing politics with our safety and with the pursuit of knowledge. The American people should demand full disclosure and prompt release of the raw images and metadata without spin.
Congress should do its job and hold oversight hearings until every camera feed, timestamp, and raw image is produced and explained in plain language to the public. We should also be investing in real space situational awareness and contingency capability — from extending useful spacecraft missions to funding rapid-response intercepts — so that when an object like 3I/ATLAS visits our neighborhood, America leads the investigation instead of being reduced to hand-wringing. It’s time to stop treating space as an ivory-tower curiosity and start treating it like the strategic frontier it is.
