Look, no one said building a large harvester to roam around the Moon and sift through hundreds of tons of regolith to retrieve small amounts of helium-3 would be easy. And that's to say nothing of the enormous challenge of processing and then launching any of this material from the lunar surface before finally landing it safely on Earth.

If we're being completely honest, doing all of this commercially is a pretty darn difficult row to hoe. Many commercial space experts dismiss it out of hand. So that's why it's gratifying to see that a company that is proposing to do this, Interlune, is taking some modest steps toward this goal.

Moreover, recent changes in the tides of space policy may also put some wind in the sails of Interlune and its considerable ambitions.

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© Interlune

Negotiations over the US federal budget for fiscal year 2026 are in the beginning stages, but when it comes to space, the fault lines are already solidifying in the Senate.

The Trump White House released its budget request last Friday, and this included detailed information about its plans for NASA. On Thursday, just days later, the US Senate shot back with its own budget priorities for the space agency.

The US budget process is complicated and somewhat broken in recent years, as Congress has failed to pass a budget on time. So, we are probably at least several months away from seeing a final fiscal year 2026 budget from Congress. But we got our first glimpse of the Senate's thinking when the chair of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released his "legislative directives" for NASA on Thursday

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© Getty Images | Tom Williams

A remarkable schoolyard brawl erupted online Thursday between President Donald Trump and his former "First Buddy" Elon Musk during which the pair traded insults and barbs. The war of words reached a crescendo during the afternoon when Trump threatened Musk's federal contracts.

"The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social, at 2:37 pm ET.

Anyone with a reasonable grasp of reality understood that the "bromance" between the president of the United States and the most wealthy person in the world was going to blow up at some point, but even so, the online brouhaha that has played out Thursday is spectacular—at one point Musk suggested that Trump was in the Epstein files, for goodness' sake.

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© Brandon Bell/Getty Images

In a revealing interview published by the All-In Podcast on Wednesday, the private astronaut nominated to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, spoke at length on what he thought about the nomination process, how he would have led NASA, and the factors that led to the abrupt rescission of his nomination by President Trump.

"I got a call Friday, of last week, that the president has decided to go in a different direction," Isaacman said. "It was a real bummer."

It was a real bummer for most of the space community, myself included. To be clear, I am biased. I have gotten to know Isaacman over the last five years rather well, talking with him about his passion for spaceflight, what is working, and what is not. What I have discovered in Isaacman is a person who cares deeply about the future of US spaceflight and wants to make a meaningful contribution to its advancement. To see him done wrong like this, well, it's a very sordid affair.

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© NASA/Bill Ingalls

I did not expect to feature NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers in the Tuesday Telescope so soon, but a recent photo she shared is just sublime. (In case you missed it, we wrote about her photo of lightning from space about a month ago.)

This week Ayers has a time-lapse sequence she captured from the Cupola as the International Space Station soared near Central and South America.

"Soooooo much going on in this picture," Ayers wrote on the social media site X. "You can see Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, with South America off in the distance."

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© Nichole Ayers/NASA

The Trump administration has confirmed that it is pulling the nomination of private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA.

First reported by Semafor, the decision appears to have been made because Isaacman was not politically loyal enough to the Trump administration.

"The Administrator of NASA will help lead humanity into space and execute President Trump’s bold mission of planting the American flag on the planet Mars," Liz Huston, a White House Spokesperson, said in a statement released Saturday. "It's essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon."

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© SpaceX

I'm incredibly excited, as part of the Ars Live series, to host a conversation with three of the very best space reporters in the business on Thursday, May 29, 2025, at 3 pm EDT about the future of NASA and its deep space exploration ambitions.

Joining me in a virtual panel discussion will be:

• Christian Davenport, of The Washington Post
• Loren Grush, of Bloomberg
• Joey Roulette, of Reuters

The community of professional space reporters is fairly small, and Chris, Loren, and Joey are some of my smartest and fiercest competitors. They all have deep sourcing within the industry and important insights about what is really going on.

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© SpaceX

On Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before a launch attempt of the ninth flight test of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, Elon Musk spoke with Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger to talk about where his space company goes from here.

In recent weeks, Musk has dialed back his focus on politics and said he wants to devote the majority of his time to SpaceX and his other companies. So what does that mean?

The conversation came just ahead of the opening of Starship's launch window, at 6:30 pm CT (23:30 UTC) in South Texas. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

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© Getty Images | Mario Tama

In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers.

The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket.

"The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date.

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© United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 7.44 of the Rocket Report! We had some interesting news on Thursday afternoon from Down Under. As Gilmour Space was preparing for the second launch attempt of its Eris vehicle, as part of the pre-launch preparations, something triggered the payload fairing to deploy. We would love to see some video of that. Please.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight. On Wednesday, US-based propulsion company Venus Aerospace completed a short flight test of its rotating detonation rocket engine at Spaceport America in New Mexico, Ars reports. It is believed to be the first US-based flight test of an idea that has been discussed academically for decades. The concept has previously been tested in a handful of other countries, but never with a high-thrust engine.

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© Venus Aerospace

A US-based propulsion company, Venus Aerospace, said Wednesday it had completed a short flight test of its rotating detonation rocket engine at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The company's chief executive and co-founder, Sassie Duggleby, characterized the flight as "historic." It is believed to be the first US-based flight test of an idea that has been discussed academically for decades, a rotating detonation rocket engine. The concept has previously been tested in a handful of other countries, but never with a high-thrust engine.

"By proving this engine works beyond the lab, Venus brings the world closer to a future where hypersonic travel—traversing the globe in under two hours—becomes possible," Duggleby told Ars.

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© Venus Aerospace

NASA is considering scaling back its activities on the International Space Station, according to multiple sources. The changes, which are being considered primarily due to shortfalls in the space station budget, include:

• Reducing the size of the crew complement of Crew Dragon missions from four to three, starting with Crew-12 in February 2026
• Extending the duration of space station missions from six to eight months
• Canceling all upgrades to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer science instrument attached to the station

The changes align with a desire that was reflected in the Trump administration's "skinny budget" proposal for NASA, released last Friday, which seeks to have the US space agency reduce its activities on the ISS.

"The Budget reduces the space station’s crew size and onboard research, preparing for a safe decommissioning of the station by 2030 and replacement by commercial space stations," stated the budget request for fiscal year 2026. "Crew and cargo flights to the station would be significantly reduced. The station’s reduced research capacity would be focused on efforts critical to the Moon and Mars exploration programs."

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© NASA

Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday.

After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.

"The FAA has determined that modifying SpaceX’s vehicle operator license supporting the increased launch and landing cadence of the Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment," states the document, known as a Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact. This finding was signed by Daniel P. Murray, executive director of the FAA's Office of Operational Safety.

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© Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Most astronauts these days are fairly anonymous, and chances are you have never heard of Nichole Ayers. And that's OK.

But sometimes it's worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how accomplished these people are. Ayers, 36, flew the supersonic F-22 stealth aircraft in the international war against the Islamic State and rose to become a major in the US Air Force before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. Oh, yeah, she also completed a master's degree in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

For her first spaceflight, Ayers launched on the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station in March. This flight got a fair amount of media attention, but that was largely because the arrival of Crew-10 allowed the Crew Dragon spacecraft to which Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were assigned to return home. Since then, Ayers has spent 50 days in space, astronauting. This included a spacewalk last week, her first, alongside veteran astronaut Anne McClain.

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© Nichole Ayers/NASA

Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday.

Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.

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© NASA

In the nearly two weeks since Ars reported on the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts for NASA's science programs, scientists and Democratic lawmakers have both expressed deep concerns about the future of the space agency.

However, in a pattern consistent across a host of issues in which GOP lawmakers do not want to be seen to be publicly criticizing the Trump administration, the response to these sweeping cuts from Republican officials has been much more muted.

But this week, three prominent Republican space policy officials broke their silence. In an op-ed published Tuesday on Real Clear Science, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former House Chair Robert Walker, and the head of the landing team for NASA for the Trump-Vance transition team, Charles Miller, said they were "deeply disturbed" by the proposed cuts. All three men have played an important role in setting Republican space policy over the last decade.

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© NASA/SDO

Should the city of Houston, which proudly bills itself as "Space City," have a prized Space Shuttle orbiter on public display?

More than a decade ago, arguably, the answer was yes. After all, the Space Shuttle program was managed from Johnson Space Center, in southeastern Houston. All the astronauts who flew on the shuttle trained there. And the vehicle was operated out of Mission Control at the Houston-based facility.

But when the final decisions were being made to distribute the shuttles 15 years ago, the Houston community dragged its feet on putting together a competitive proposal. There were also questions about the ability of Space Center Houston to raise funding to house the shuttle within a new display area, which magnified concerns that the historical vehicle, like a Saturn V rocket before it, would be left outside in the region's humid environment. Finally, other cities offered better proposals for displaying the shuttles to the public.

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© The Smithsonian

This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.

This initial version of the administration's budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency's budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.

According to the "passback" documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency's science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.

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© GSFC/SVS

I recently wrote a story about the wild ride of the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last summer. It was based largely on an interview with the commander of the mission, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore.

His account of Starliner’s thruster failures—and his desperate efforts to keep the vehicle flying on course—was riveting. In the aftermath of the story, many readers, people on social media, and real-life friends congratulated me on conducting a great interview. But truth be told, it was pretty much all Wilmore.

Essentially, when I came into the room, he was primed to talk. I'm not sure if Wilmore was waiting for me specifically to talk to, but he pretty clearly wanted to speak with someone about his experiences aboard the Starliner spacecraft. And he chose me.

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© Lee Hutchinson

The approximate 20 percent budget cut could force the closure of the Goddard Space Flight Center and would see projects such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope scrapped.