Internal communications between NASA and Trump's transition team, obtained by a Motherboard FOIA, show the new administration is also interested in how the agency's research helps private industry.

President Donald Trump's 2018 federal budget blueprint deeply cuts the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and other science agencies. But it largely spares NASA. 

Where Trump wants to reduce the EPA's funding by a third, effectively gutting the agency, he's proposing a mere $200-million reduction to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's current $19.3 billion budget. The cuts mostly target NASA programs monitoring climate change and the agency's educational outreach efforts.

Thanks to internal communications between NASA and Trump's space transition team Motherboard has obtained through a Freedom of Information request (FOIA) and is publishing for the first time publicly here, we have some clues as to why Trump seems determined to keep the space agency mostly intact. The administration seems to be very interested in NASA's moneymaking potential.

Specifically, Trump's team—which is made up of several space entrepreneurs, including Charles Miller of NextGen Space—has inquired about NASA's ability to develop technology for commercial use, as well as the agency's plan to survey the Moon for useful raw materials and evaluate the potential of their extractability (a.k.a. mining). 

In the 100-plus pages of documents that Motherboard obtained—including emails, briefings, directories and budget spreadsheets—Trump's agency review team, or ART, asks only a handful of questions of NASA. One of them deals with the technology NASA develops, and whether anyone can profit from it.

"The ART has requested the following information," one briefing paper states. "Provide data and examples of how NASA does technology development (perhaps even in the form of products) when working with industry—for example, types of contracts/partnerships and IP [intellectual property] arrangements."