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
© Getty Images | Tom Williams
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.
© NASA/Bill Ingalls
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."
© 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:
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.
© SpaceX
SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world's most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program's two previous launches.
But minutes into the mission, SpaceX's Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.
SpaceX's next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.
© SpaceX
Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There's been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week's newsletter, but it's just a taste of the US military's appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon's emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy's hypersonic missiles. China has already declared its first hypersonic weapons operational, and Russia claims to have them, too. Now, the Pentagon is finally close to placing hypersonic missiles with combat units. Many US rocket companies believe the hypersonics sector is a lucrative business. Some companies have enough confidence in this emerging market—or lack of faith in the traditional space launch market—to pivot entirely toward hypersonics. I'm interested in seeing if their bets pay off.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.
Stratolaunch tests reusable hypersonic rocket plane. Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world's largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. Stratolaunch used the same Talon-A vehicle for both flights, demonstrating its reusability, a characteristic that sets it apart from competitors. Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO, said his team aims to ramp up to monthly flights by the end of the year.
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.
© NASA
Welcome to Edition 7.41 of the Rocket Report! NASA and its contractors at Kennedy Space Center in Florida continue building a new mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, a taller, upgraded version of the SLS rocket being used for the agency's initial Artemis lunar missions. Workers stacked another segment of the tower a couple of weeks ago, and the structure is inching closer to its full height of 355 feet (108 meters). But this is just the start. Once the tower is fully assembled, it must be outfitted with miles of cabling, tubing, and piping and then be tested before it can support an SLS launch campaign. Last year, NASA's inspector general projected the tower won't be ready for a launch until the spring of 2029, and its costs could reach $2.7 billion. The good news, if you can call it that, is that there probably won't be an SLS Block 1B rocket that needs to use it in 2029, whether it's due to delays or cancellation.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.
Fresh details on Astra's strategic pivot. Astra, the once high-flying rocket startup that crashed back to Earth with investors before going private last year, has unveiled new details about its $44 million contract with the Department of Defense, Space News reports. The DOD contract announced last year supports the development of Rocket 4, a two-stage, mobile launch vehicle with ambitions to deliver cargo across the globe in under an hour. While Astra's ill-fated Rocket 3 focused on launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit, Astra wants to make Rocket 4 a military utility vehicle. Rocket 4 will still be able to loft conventional satellites, but Astra's most lucrative contract for the new launch vehicle involves using the rocket for precise point-to-point delivery of up to 1,300 pounds (590 kilograms) of supplies from orbit via specialized reentry vehicles. The military has shown interest in developing a rocket-based rapid global cargo delivery system for several years, and it has a contract with SpaceX to study how the much larger Starship rocket could do a similar job.
© Photo by Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images
In an era of reusable rockets and near-daily access to space, NASA is still paying more than it did 30 years ago to launch missions into orbit, according to a study soon to be published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.
Launch is becoming more routine. Every few days, SpaceX is sending another batch of Starlink Internet satellites to orbit, and other kinds of missions fill up the rest of SpaceX's launch schedule. SpaceX, alone, has ample capacity to launch the handful of science missions NASA puts into space each year. If supply outpaces demand, shouldn't prices go down?
It's not so simple. NASA is one of many customers jockeying for a slot on SpaceX's launch manifest. The US military is launching more missions than ever before, and SpaceX is about to become the Pentagon's top launch provider. SpaceX already launches more missions for NASA than any other rocket company.
© SpaceX
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.
© NASA/SDO
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