House and Senate appropriators criticized a NASA budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 that includes significant cuts, suggesting they may instead use last year’s spending bill as a guide.

Eleven years after launch and nearly a thousand days past its Pluto encounter, New Horizons is still transmitting from beyond 60 AU. A look at what the mission found, what its extended phase is still teaching us, and why the team behind it matters as much as the spacecraft.

The post The complete story of New Horizons: how a thousand-day flyby of Pluto rewrote planetary science and what its extended mission is still teaching us appeared first on Space Daily.

Pluto’s most powerful new advocate is now the head of NASA. On Tuesday, April 28, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations to discuss the agency’s fiscal 2027 budget request. Most of the hearing covered the usual ground: Artemis II’s recent success, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch timeline, […]

The post The head of NASA is now openly campaigning to make Pluto a planet again appeared first on Space Daily.

Most of the time when this question gets asked, the answer is some version of “probably not.” The search is too big, the instruments too small, the universe too empty. I have made that case myself, and I think it is correct as a description of where we have been. It is not, however, a […]

The post By 2075, the question won’t be whether alien life exists. It will be where appeared first on Space Daily.

A manufacturing defect at a single European supplier has corroded structural modules destined for both NASA’s lunar Gateway and Axiom Space’s commercial station. The defect, traced to forging and surface treatment work performed by Thales Alenia Space at facilities in Italy, has now become one of the official justifications for NASA’s decision to suspend Gateway […]

The post How a Welding Defect in Italy Gave NASA the Excuse It Needed to Kill Gateway appeared first on Space Daily.

Mark this one as the moment orbital defense became its own asset class. On April 28, Colorado-based True Anomaly announced a $650 million Series D fundraise that values the four-year-old startup at $2.2 billion. The round, first reported by Bloomberg, was co-led by Eclipse and Riot Ventures, with new investors including Paradigm, Atreides, G Squared, […]

The post A startup nobody had heard of four years ago is now valued at $2.2 billion. Its product is space weapons appeared first on Space Daily.

For seventy years, every spacecraft NASA sent to another world either landed in one place and stayed there, or rolled slowly across the surface on wheels. Then in April 2021, a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity lifted ten feet off the floor of Mars’s Jezero Crater, hovered for thirty seconds, and changed the rules. Five years […]

The post NASA flew a four-pound helicopter on Mars. The follow-up weighs nearly a ton and is going to Saturn appeared first on Space Daily.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — April 28, 2026 — Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1983 to advance the global space community, will premiere its National Space Day educational video on Friday, May […]

Mars has been the answer for as long as humans have been able to look up at it. Domed cities. Brave settlers tilling the rust-coloured soil. A second chance for our species after we’ve finished wrecking the first one. The reality is something else. Mars is not a frontier waiting patiently for us. Mars is, […]

The post The brutal reality of trying to build a home on Mars appeared first on Space Daily.

Imagine being ninety years old, strapping into a rocket, and shooting yourself out of the atmosphere. Most people in their nineties are slowing down. Watching their grandkids run around the yard. Reading the morning paper. Not William Shatner. In October 2021, the legendary Star Trek actor became the oldest person ever to fly to space, […]

The post The 90-year-old who became the oldest person in space — and what he said when he came back appeared first on Space Daily.