NASA’s Artemis II, endangered species and oil, low western U.S. snowpack | Scientific American

April 6, 2026

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NASA’s Artemis II nears the moon, oil trumps endangered species, snowpack plummets

An update on NASA’s historic moon mission, alarm over the low snowpack in the western U.S. and a move that could endanger wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico

By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Andrea Thompson, Sushmita Pathak & Alex Sugiura

Mario Tama/GettyImages

NASA has launched four astronauts on a pioneering journey around the moon—the Artemis II mission. Follow our coverage here.

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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

First, a quick update on NASA’s moon mission, which lifted off last week. Last Thursday Artemis II left Earth orbit, making the four astronauts onboard the first humans in over 50 years to do so. And today is a critical day for the mission as it plans to execute a historic lunar flyby and go farther from Earth than any human ever has.

In environmental news, last Tuesday the Endangered Species Committee exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act, or the ESA, despite widespread consensus that it could lead to some species going extinct.

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The last time the committee met was in 1992, under President George H. W. Bush. Back then members voted to exempt logging in the habitat of Oregon’s northern spotted owl, a bird that is under threat of extinction. That request, however, was ultimately withdrawn.

This time the committee convened at the request of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The defense secretary said the move was necessary for national security in light of ongoing lawsuits.

[CLIP: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaking at the committee meeting on March 31, 2026: “This pending litigation in district court seeks to stop Gulf oil and gas activities rather than allowing the integration of oil and gas production with responsible endangered-species protections.”]

Pierre-Louis: Hegseth didn’t specify which lawsuits he was referring to.

According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, between 2018 and 2023 the U.S. produced more crude oil than any other country in the world. Nationwide the U.S. produced more crude oil in 2025 than it ever has, and a March forecast by the EIA says the nation is on track to do about the same this year. The Gulf of Mexico is already one of the nation’s top oil-producing regions, generating some 80 million gallons of oil per day, or enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool roughly 120 times. This accounts for nearly 15 percent of the annual crude oil production in the U.S.

In April 2010 the Gulf was also the site of the nation’s largest marine oil spill. That is when the Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling rig, operated by BP, exploded, killing 11 workers, injuring 17, and releasing more than 130 million gallons of oil in 87 days. The spill is also believed to have killed about 95,000 to 200,000 sea turtles, including Kemp’s ridley, green, loggerhead, hawksbill and leatherback turtles, all of which are either threatened or endangered under the ESA. A study that looked at the endangered whale species known as the Rice’s whale, which only lives in the Gulf of Mexico, found that in the aftermath of the spill, the population declined by as much as 22 percent. Today there are only an estimated 50 Rice’s whales remaining.

A 2011 presidential commission report on the explosion found that the spill was preventable and that the immediate causes could be traced to mistakes that revealed, quote, “such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.” The report also found systemic regulatory failures by the Minerals Management Service, based in part on a too cozy relationship between some officials and the industry with which they were tasked to regulate.

The six-member panel who voted unanimously for the ESA exemption in the Gulf is made up of political appointees, including the secretary of the interior and the acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

In more news about the Trump administration, last Wednesday the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced that it will move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, despite concerns over worsening brain drain.

The move comes as part of a broader plan to massively overhaul the agency, including shuttering all nine existing regional offices and at least 5