Space agency and policy news from Cosmic Herald — NASA, ESA, ISRO, China's CNSA, budgets, and the politics of spaceflight.
Uzbekistan signed the Artemis Accords in Samarkand on Oct. 19 during a visit by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, becoming the 77th signatory. It arrives with a student CubeSat due by 2028 and plans to host the International Astronautical Congress that year.
Read the story →NASA has locked in contract actions for SR-1 Freedom's nuclear power module. Sierra Lobo will build the Brayton-cycle converter that turns an Idaho National Laboratory reactor's heat into electricity, and the spacecraft is due to launch for Mars in late 2028 carrying the three-helicopter SkyFall payload.
Four NASA volunteers have spent 365 days inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed Mars habitat in Houston, with 13 days to go before the second CHAPEA mission ends on 31 October.
Meeting in Versailles, the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures voted to make UTC continuous from 20 May 2027, ending leap seconds. It also backed a lunar reference time scale built on the IAU's Lunar Coordinate Time and traceable to UTC.
ESA's 2026 Space Environment Report warns of runaway collision growth and adds a new reentry casualty-risk metric, and weeks later LeoLabs spotted tens of fragments from the long-dead Soviet satellite Meteor 2-7 near 855 km.
NASA has pulled 34-year Marshall veteran Stephen Cash out of retirement to run the Huntsville center behind SLS, the Human Landing System and nuclear propulsion work, effective Oct. 19, with acting director Rae Ann Meyer returning to the deputy role.
NASA's SPEARS prototype solid-state cells ran from 80 C down to -60 C, kept going at reduced performance to -80 C, and came through exposure from 100 C to -170 C undamaged. Lunar south pole nights reach -200 C, though, and these are still small lab cells that have never flown.
Six months after flying around the Moon, Christina Koch is giving up spaceflight eligibility to become NASA's acting deputy chief engineer. She is the last of the four Artemis II astronauts to take a new role, and NASA has set an Oct. 23 briefing on Artemis III and its 2028 landing plan.
NASA's $150,000 Lunar Grounding Challenge wants a device that safely drains static charge from Artemis astronauts at the lunar south pole before they touch the lander. NASA's design case puts the suit near -100 kV.
Crew-12's Dragon Freedom splashed down off Los Angeles on Oct. 8 after 237 days. Two days later ESA's Sophie Adenot landed in Cologne holding a new European record for the longest single spaceflight, and ESA is pointing to December's ministerial meeting in Rome.
NASA and the Energy Department signed an MOU covering space fission power and propulsion from fuel production to launch and operations. It backs SR-1 Freedom, a Mars mission set for 2028, and a lunar surface reactor that is meant to be ready for launch by 2030.
NASA's new GIMLI payload will carry radar, seismometers, a gravimeter and cameras to the Marius Hills Pit to find out whether the hole opens into a lava tube big enough to shelter future Moon Base crews.
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