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Billionaire entrepreneur who founded Shift4 Payments, commanded the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private spaceflights, and now serves as NASA Administrator.
NASA and the Energy Department signed one memorandum covering space nuclear work from fuel production to launch, ahead of a 2028 reactor flight. It takes effect Nov. 1, and a December 2025 executive order already calls for a launch-ready lunar reactor by 2030.
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NASA's Crew-13 launched four crew Thursday on a Dragon due to dock at the space station 7 hours 50 minutes later, a U.S. record by NASA's account. NASA stated the record before the docking took place, so it holds only once the 7 p.m. arrival happens.
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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has returned NASA's Mars missions to COSPAR's 1964 limit of one-in-10,000 contamination odds per mission. The looser rule applies now, and a review due in December 2026 is meant to recommend lowering the threshold further.
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SpaceX flew Starship to orbit for the first time on September 28, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite one of the upper stage's six engines going out at liftoff. The flight moves the vehicle closer to the operational heavy-lift launcher NASA and SpaceX are counting on.
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SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on September 28 and deployed 26 working Starlink V3 satellites, each built to add 1 Tbps of capacity. Buyers can count on that capacity this quarter, while teams hoping to book Starship for their own payloads have one partial orbital flight to judge it by.
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NASA intends to exercise options for a fifth and sixth Boeing Starliner flight and to fly an uncrewed test as early as December, with crew returning by 2028. The plan would keep a second US crew capsule available beside SpaceX's Crew Dragon, if Boeing's thruster fixes hold up in flight.
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Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover moved to emeritus advisory roles at NASA to help teams prepare Artemis III for 2027. Their Orion experience will now reach that Earth-orbit docking test through volunteer mentoring.
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Two of three reaction wheels failed on Katalyst's LINK spacecraft, so NASA cancelled the capture-and-boost. What is left, rendezvous and proximity data, is what this industry can actually do.
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Katalyst's Link spacecraft never got close enough to grab the sinking telescope. Swift now reenters later this year, and on-orbit rescue remains a demonstration, not a planning assumption.
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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should return its first images in early 2027, and its Wide Field Instrument will deliver them over at least 100 times the sky Hubble frames in a single pointing.
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Ten current and former staff told Scientific American that NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center no longer has the people or the equipment to build a telescope like Roman. NASA says flagship missions remain a core Goddard capability.
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Trump signed the order at Johnson Space Center on Aug. 28, and what it actually creates is a study group with four months to work out who a NASA-run academy's graduates would serve and who would pay for them.
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Every dollar of the $4.3bn observatory rode one vehicle from one provider, which is the concentration number to carry into any space-sector position, whatever the science eventually turns out to be worth.
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The order signed at Johnson Space Center stands up a commission under NASA's administrator. The plan it owes the president by late December is where training vendors learn whether appropriations follow the rhetoric.
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The Artemis II crew flew 252,756 miles from Earth, farther than anyone before them. The medals presented in Houston close the mission out institutionally, while its successor is scheduled to stay in low Earth orbit.
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Space Force growth and lunar ambition are the stated rationale, and NASA's own leadership drew the design work on a four-month clock. The announcement puts no size on the workforce gap the school would close.
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The nine-month rescue vehicle failed upstream of the grapple, so the flight tested attitude control rather than capture, and mission planners still have no servicing result they can bank on.
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The LINK rescue spacecraft lost dependable attitude control, so the 22-year-old observatory keeps falling. NASA now expects reentry before the end of 2026.
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