The Planetary Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by three people who believed ordinary citizens could shape the future of space exploration: Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman. That belief, planted in the first year of a new decade, has since grown into a community of more than 2 million space enthusiasts across more than 80 countries. But size alone doesn't capture what makes this organization unusual. The Planetary Society doesn't launch government rockets or employ career astronauts. It runs on individual donations. And yet it has been credited with helping save missions to Pluto, Venus, and Jupiter's moon Europa from congressional cancellation. How does a nonprofit change the course of space history? And what drives its members, decade after decade, to keep writing letters, attending hearings, and funding small spacecraft that sail on sunlight?

• 2. Sagan's Political Machine

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  Carl Sagan was already one of the most recognized scientists in America when The Planetary Society was founded, and he used that celebrity deliberately. In 1981, just one year after the organization's founding, he deployed his political influence to protect SETI from congressional cancellation. It was a preview of the role the society would play for the next several decades: a citizen-powered force operating at the edge of government budget decisions.

  Sagan co-led the society until his death in 1996. During that period, the organization pushed what it described as a scientific and technological agenda that helped kindle broader interest in rover-based planetary exploration. The principal investigator of New Horizons, Alan Stern, has publicly credited The Planetary Society with having helped prevent that mission from being cancelled at multiple points during its development. The New Horizons story, in particular, shows how the society's work in the 1980s and 1990s planted seeds that took decades to bear fruit.

  When Bill Nye became executive director on the 7th of June 2010, the organization had a new public face. Nye now serves as Chief Ambassador and Vice Chairman, while Jennifer Vaughn leads as CEO. The 12-member volunteer Board of Directors, which meets twice per year, includes planetary scientists Bethany Ehlmann and Heidi Hammel, as well as actor Robert Picardo. Past board and advisory council members have included astronauts Sally Ride and Michael Collins, authors Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov, Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey, and senators Harrison Schmitt and Adlai Stevenson III.

• 3. Fighting for Europa and Beyond

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  In the 1990s, The Planetary Society began pushing for a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, long considered one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life. That advocacy campaign stretched across more than two decades before NASA's Europa Clipper entered official development.

  The stakes sharpened in 2013, when Congress considered cancelling the mission outright. The society launched a multi-year campaign and met frequently with Congressman John Culberson, who chaired the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies at the time. Society members sent over 380,000 letters to their political representatives in support of Europa Clipper. The volume was significant enough to shift the political calculus.

  The society has also organized major campaigns in support of the NEO Surveyor mission, which aims to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. Its most recent large-scale fight began on the 11th of April 2025, when the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed cutting NASA's science funding by 47% for the 2026 fiscal year. The Planetary Society called the proposed cuts "unprecedented, unstrategic, and wasteful" and launched its "Save NASA Science" campaign in response. On the 6th of October 2025, CEO Bill Nye and over 300 supporters gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for a joint Day of Action alongside allied scientific organizations. Congress passed a final budget in early 2026 that restored full funding for NASA's science directorate, making the event the largest advocacy success in the society's history.

• 4. Sailing on Sunlight

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  LightSail 2 launched on the 25th of June 2019, and successfully used sunlight pressure to change its orbit. That sentence, simple as it sounds, represents the culmination of a project crowdfunded by ordinary society members who wanted to prove a concept that scientists had theorized for generations. Solar sailing uses the gentle push of photons as a means of propulsion, requiring no chemical fuel.

  The first mission in the pair, LightSail 1, launched on the 20th of May 2015, and performed a test deployment of its solar sail on the 7th of June 2015. LightSail 2 followed four years later and went further, demonstrating actual orbital maneuvering. TIME named LightSail 2 one of its 100 Best Inventions of 2019, and Popular Science gave it a separate award. The Planetary Society published data from both flights in a number of scientific papers, and chief scientist Bruce Betts has since consulted with NASA teams working on their own solar sail missions.

  The LightSail program sits alongside a broader portfolio of society-sponsored technology. In 2013, the organization helped fund a prototype and laboratory test of Honeybee Robotics' PlanetVac instrument, a sample-collection device designed for use on other worlds. A version of PlanetVac landed and operated on the Moon on the 2nd of March 2025, as part of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1. A separate version, called the P Sampler, is scheduled to fly as part of JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration mission, which aims to bring back material from the Martian moon Phobos and is targeted for launch in 2026.

• 5. Listening for Other Worlds

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  In 1981, The Planetary Society partnered with NASA to fund Suitcase SETI, an instrument that was later expanded into Sentinel, described as the first dedicated high-resolution survey to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Four years after that, the society collaborated with Steven Spielberg to finance the Megachannel ExtraTerrestrial Array, known as META, which was the most advanced SETI search in existence at the time.

  Subsequent projects included META II, the SERENDIP radio survey, the first dedicated all-sky optical SETI survey, a citizen science project titled "Are we alone in the universe?", and the SETI@home initiative, which used a volunteer network of personal computers to process SERENDIP data. Each project built on the last, with the society functioning as a sustained funder across four decades of extraterrestrial intelligence research.

  In 2021, the society established its Science and Technology Empowering the Public grants, known as STEP Grants, to formalize its support for a wider range of projects. Grant recipients have included an asteroid research program at the University of Belgrade, a space agriculture program at the University of Florida, a citizen science SETI project based out of the University of California, Los Angeles, and an astrobiology project at Dartmouth College focused on saline marine environments on other worlds. The society has awarded nearly $200,000 across four projects so far.

• 6. Amateur Astronomers on Guard

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  In 1997, The Planetary Society founded the Shoemaker NEO Grant program to build a global network of amateur astronomers dedicated to tracking potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. Awardees receive funds to upgrade their observing equipment. More than 50 astronomers in over 20 countries have received grants since the program's founding, with over $500,000 awarded to date.

  As of 2025, those grant recipients have helped discover nearly 500 near-Earth objects and contributed observations of over 19,000 others. One recent winner, Leonardo Amaral, discovered a rare kilometer-sized asteroid in 2020. That object, designated 2020 QU6, is large enough that an impact with Earth would cause global devastation, though current orbital data shows no such impact is anticipated.

  The network reflects a consistent philosophy running through the society's work: that trained and equipped non-professionals can contribute meaningfully to planetary science. The same logic underlies the naming contests the society has organized over the years. The minor planets Bonestell, Nereus, and Braille were all named through society-organized contests. So was Bennu, the target asteroid of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission. In a partnership with the LEGO Group, the society ran the naming contest for the Mars Exploration Rovers, from which NASA selected the names Spirit and Opportunity.

• 7. The Voice on the Radio

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  In 2002, The Planetary Society launched Planetary Radio, a weekly program and podcast hosted initially by Mat Kaplan. Episodes feature conversations with astronomers, planetary scientists, engineers, mission project managers, astronauts, artists, and advocates. In 2023, Sarah Al-Ahmed became the new host and producer.

  The society also releases monthly episodes of Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition, which features interviews by the society's Chief of Space Policy, Casey Dreier, with guests working in space policy and politics. The two programs together give listeners both a wide-angle view of space science and a detailed look at how funding decisions shape what missions are possible.

  The Planetary Report, the society's quarterly magazine, has been published since the organization's founding in 1980 and reaches its 40,000 members worldwide. Space policy experts at the society regularly contribute op-eds to publications including The New York Times and SpaceNews. As of 2025, the society's social media channels have been nominated for two Webby awards, a measure of how its public voice has migrated from print and radio into the platforms where most audiences now spend their time.