NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Commercial
The Upper Stage Problem: Why Reusable Second Stages Are Harder Than They Look
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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Missions
VIPER Is Cancelled. Here's Why NASA's Ice-Hunting Rover Mattered.
NASA cancelled the VIPER rover in 2024 after costs ballooned and schedules slipped. The science it was supposed to do — characterizing water ice at the lunar south pole — still needs to be done before Artemis astronauts go there.
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Military Space
Anti-satellite weapons are real, tested, and leaving debris clouds that threaten everyone
China, Russia, the US, and India have all tested direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. The debris those tests create persists for decades. The tension between military necessity and orbital sustainability is becoming one of the defining strategic problems of the 2020s.
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Missions
NASA's DAVINCI mission will drop a probe through Venus's atmosphere. Here's what it's looking for.
DAVINCI is a spherical probe designed to fall through Venus's corrosive atmosphere for about an hour, sampling the air at every altitude. It's looking for evidence that Venus once had oceans — and why it lost them.
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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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Commercial
Low Earth orbit has a garbage problem. Here's who's trying to clean it up.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, and hundreds of thousands more too small to track. Two companies — Astroscale and ClearSpace — are building the first commercial debris removal spacecraft. The engineering is harder than it sounds.
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Astronomy
The missing planets: why there's a gap in the size distribution of worlds around other stars
Kepler data revealed a strange gap in exoplanet sizes: planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii are surprisingly rare. The leading explanation involves atmospheric loss driven by stellar radiation, and JWST is now testing that theory directly.
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Missions
Five years of Perseverance: what the rover has actually changed about how we think about Mars
NASA's Perseverance rover has spent five years in Jezero Crater, coring ancient lake sediments and producing oxygen from thin Martian air. The science is more nuanced than the headlines suggest — and the sample cache it's building may be the most important thing it does.
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Commercial
Private companies are landing on the Moon. Here's what the scoreboard actually looks like.
NASA's CLPS program has funded multiple private lunar landers with mixed results. Intuitive Machines stuck the landing sideways; Astrobotic's Peregrine did not reach the surface. A clearer picture of commercial lunar capability is forming, and it's more complicated than press releases suggest.
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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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Stargazing
America's Astronomy Clubs: A State-by-State Guide
From Stellafane in Vermont to the Houston Astronomical Society, 203 amateur astronomy clubs span all 50 U.S. states — and what they offer goes far beyond monthly meetings under the stars.
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Commercial
The first private module is going to the ISS. It's a down payment on something bigger.
Axiom Space is attaching a commercial module to the International Space Station — and it's designed to eventually detach and operate as an independent station after the ISS is decommissioned. The module going up now is the foundation for the first fully private orbital outpost.
