NASA & Agencies
Space agency and policy news from Cosmic Herald — NASA, ESA, ISRO, China's CNSA, budgets, and the politics of spaceflight.
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NASA & Agencies
America's Lunar Economic Frontier: The Quiet Revolution in How We Plan to Use the Moon
The Moon sits 240,000 miles away — and Washington increasingly sees it not as a scientific destination but as the next great economic frontier, with commercial partners leading the charge.
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NASA & Agencies
Katalyst LINK Spacecraft Integrated for Swift Observatory Rescue Mission
NASA's aging Swift Observatory faces imminent orbital reentry after decaying from 600km to 400km altitude. Katalyst Space's LINK robotic servicing spacecraft, integrated onto a Pegasus XL rocket, launches in late June to grip the telescope with lidar-guided arms and boost it back to operational orbit using ion thrusters.
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NASA & Agencies
ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover: Still Alive, Still Going to Mars
ESA's ExoMars rover survived the loss of its Russian Roscosmos partnership and is being rebuilt for a European launch. If it gets to Mars, it will carry a drill no other mission has ever attempted.
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NASA & Agencies
India's space program is moving faster than anyone expected. Here's where it stands.
ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 south pole landing in 2023 and Aditya-L1 solar observatory marked a turning point. With Gaganyaan crewed flights approaching and a Venus mission on the books, India is building the infrastructure of a major spacefaring nation.
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NASA & Agencies
Russia in space, 2026: what's left of the program after four years of isolation
Roscosmos has shed international partners, lost Soyuz commercial launch contracts, and watched its GLONASS constellation degrade. What remains is a human spaceflight program, a military reconnaissance constellation, and ambitious plans whose funding remains unclear.
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NASA & Agencies
China's space station is done. Now it's being used.
Tiangong — China's modular space station — has completed its core assembly and is now hosting regular rotating crews for science, materials research, and technology demonstration. Understanding what China is actually doing in orbit matters as competition for the high ground intensifies.
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NASA & Agencies
ESA is building a telescope just for exoplanet atmospheres. Ariel will change what we know.
The European Space Agency's Ariel mission — the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey — is designed to systematically characterize the atmospheres of hundreds of exoplanets in a single mission. It's the first telescope built specifically to answer the question: what are other planets made of?
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NASA & Agencies
India is about to send humans to space for the first time. Here's where Gaganyaan stands.
India's Gaganyaan program — the country's first crewed spaceflight mission — has completed its uncrewed test flights and is closing in on a crew launch. A successful mission would make India only the fourth nation to independently send humans to orbit.
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NASA & Agencies
JAXA is going to the moons of Mars. MMX wants to answer a 150-year-old question.
Japan's Martian Moons eXploration mission is designed to land on Phobos, collect a sample, and bring it back to Earth. The mission is also a test case for a new kind of planetary science — studying small, dark bodies that may preserve material from the early solar system.
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NASA & Agencies
Webb's second year of science: the results that changed things
The James Webb Space Telescope is now well into its second year of full science operations. The first year produced headlines; the second year is producing data that the community is actually working through — and some of it is genuinely difficult to absorb.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA is being asked to do less with less. What actually gets cut first?
NASA faces its most constrained budget environment in a generation. When the money tightens, choices have to be made — and understanding which missions survive and which get cancelled reveals a great deal about the agency's priorities, its politics, and the tradeoffs built into human versus robotic exploration.
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NASA & Agencies
China's Tiangong station is complete and permanently crewed. Here's what it's doing.
Tiangong, China's modular space station in low Earth orbit, reached its full three-module configuration in 2022 and has maintained a continuous crew since. It conducts experiments in biology, materials science, space medicine, and Earth observation, while serving as the operational backbone of China's long-term human spaceflight program.
