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I’m a space scientist. Utah is subsidizing my research with its health.

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by London Vallery, opinion contributor - 05/16/26 2:00 PM ET

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by London Vallery, opinion contributor - 05/16/26 2:00 PM ET

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FILE – State of Utah Department of Natural Resources park ranger Angelic Lemmon walks across reef-like structures called microbialites, exposed by receding waters at the Great Salt Lake on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022, near Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer,File)

The U.S. just brought astronauts home from a Moon orbit for the first time in 50 years. The pride that followed this was real and deserved. I felt it.

Then I thought about Utah, and felt something more complicated. As Utah’s Great Salt Lake shrinks, it is becoming a valuable scientific asset — and the cost is being paid by the 2.5 million Utahns facing the severe consequences of its decline.

I am an astrobiologist. I study whether life could exist, or once existed, on other planets. To answer that question, I study places on Earth that resemble what those planets could have looked like when they still had water. I travel to salt flats, dry basins, and shorelines where the water is retreating and the minerals left behind preserve a record of what used to live there.

My job, essentially, is to learn how and why environments collapse after water leaves. This research depends on having living systems on Earth where that process is still ongoing — places I can observe, sample, and compare against what our rovers are finding on Mars.

The Great Salt Lake is one of those places. When the lake’s water recedes, it exposes white salt terraces along the shoreline that bear a fair resemblance to mineral deposits discovered on Mars. Because of this, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked with Great Salt Lake researchers to test instrument methods before the Perseverance rover launched in 2020.

When the lake hit record lows two years later, a new round of shoreline samples found living microorganisms sealed inside salt crystals — the same preservation process the rover is now searching for evidence of on Mars. The lake’s decline, in other words, has been producing exactly the kind of field site my colleagues need.

I want to be honest about what that means, because this crisis has birthed an unsettling irony. Utah’s shrinking lake is generating scientific value — for researchers, for space agencies, even for a country watching rocket launches with unconcerned enthusiasm.

The people paying for that are the 2.5 million residents of the Wasatch Front. Their payment comes in the form of dust storms blowing off an exposed lakebed, of worsening air quality every dry season, and of an economy that loses roughly $2 billion annually as the water drops.

Utah is not just losing a lake. It is personally subsidizing a national scientific asset with a direct environmental tax that nobody voted for.

I don’t live in Utah. I do not have the context of having a beloved local symbol disappear. But what I do have is a professional understanding of what a system looks like when it is running out of time. There is something eerie about a reality that should be 140 million miles away and 3 billion years in the past showing up at your doorstep today.

The data behind that feeling is worth understanding. The Great Salt Lake ended 2025 at its third-lowest elevation since records began in 1903, and that happened after a rebound year. The water came back, but the lake still underperformed. A good snow year produces a rise, there is relief, and the crisis feels resolved. But the floor keeps shifting. The 2023 rebound was real, but it didn’t hold. What looks like recovery is actually sputtering.

But my field’s benefit also has a caveat. The science that benefits from the lake’s decline still depends on the lake being alive. The reason those shoreline samples matter is that living organisms are being actively sealed into minerals right now, in a process researchers can observe and study in real time. That is what makes the Great Salt Lake useful as a research site. A collapsed lake cannot offer that.

The window upon which my colleagues are currently capitalizing closes the moment this system crosses the irreversible threshold it is now approaching. At that point Utah will have paid the full cost with nothing left to show for it.

This brings the politics of the situation into focus. Utah’s 2026 legislative session passed important water bills that streamlined water rights, directed nearly $100 million to the lake, and formally requested federal partnership.

But state lawmakers declined to pass bills that would have required cuts to urban outdoor irrigation — a category that has grown 60 percent since 2001, and now