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
ESA's next decade in space: gravitational wave detectors, exoplanet atmospheres, and Venus.
The European Space Agency's science program for the 2030s includes LISA (a space-based gravitational wave observatory), Ariel (systematic exoplanet atmosphere survey), and EnVision (a Venus orbiter). Together they address three of the biggest open questions in astrophysics.
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NASA & Agencies
Boeing's crew capsule is still on the ground. What Starliner's failure means for human spaceflight.
Boeing's Starliner flew its first crewed mission in June 2024 — and left two astronauts stranded on the ISS for nine months after thruster failures and helium leaks forced NASA to return the capsule uncrewed. As of mid-2026, Starliner's future remains unresolved.
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NASA & Agencies
ESA's JUICE is threading five planetary flybys to reach the most interesting moons in the solar system
Launched in April 2023, JUICE — Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer — will arrive at Jupiter in 2031 after a gravity-assist marathon. Its destination is Ganymede, where it will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit a moon other than our own.
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NASA & Agencies
Six toaster-sized satellites are about to become one giant radio telescope
NASA's SunRISE mission, targeting a summer 2026 launch, will fly six small satellites in formation so they act as a single radio telescope ten kilometers wide — built to trace the solar storms that threaten astronauts and power grids.
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NASA & Agencies
The orbital junkyard is getting dangerous — and the first cleanup missions are flying
Low Earth orbit is filling with dead satellites and shattered debris moving at bullet speeds. After years of warnings, the first missions designed to grab and de-orbit junk are now reaching space, led by Europe's ClearSpace and Japan's Astroscale.
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NASA & Agencies
India is one uncrewed test flight away from joining the human-spaceflight club
ISRO is preparing to fly Gaganyaan-1, the uncrewed shakedown of India's first homegrown crew vehicle, with a humanoid robot aboard. Success would put a crewed flight within reach in 2027 — and make India the fourth nation to launch its own astronauts.
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NASA & Agencies
A familiar crack: why the station's crew spent an afternoon inside a Dragon
On 5 June the International Space Station's crew suited up and retreated into a docked Crew Dragon as an old leak on the Russian segment worsened. The scare passed within hours — but the fault behind it has resisted six years of repairs.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA science is staring down a 47% cut — again. Here's where it actually stands.
The White House's 2027 request would gut NASA's science directorate and cancel roughly half its missions. It is also the second year in a row Congress has signaled it won't go along. Untangling the proposal from the likely outcome.
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NASA & Agencies
Mars Sample Return: the architecture, and the reckoning
Bringing Perseverance's cached samples to Earth would be the most complex robotic campaign ever flown. Its cost and schedule have forced NASA into a hard rethink — and, as of 2026, the agency is weighing competing architectures rather than committing to one.
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NASA & Agencies
Who actually runs space? A field guide to the agencies
Spaceflight is now a multipolar, increasingly commercial enterprise, structured as much by alliances as by rockets. A guide to the major agencies — their specialities, their constraints, and the strategic fault lines forming between them.
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NASA & Agencies
After 11 years mapping how Mars lost its air, MAVEN goes silent
NASA has declared its MAVEN orbiter unrecoverable after a December anomaly. The mission rewrote our understanding of how Mars lost its atmosphere — and leaves a record of more than 800 papers behind it.
