Space agency and policy news from Cosmic Herald — NASA, ESA, ISRO, China's CNSA, budgets, and the politics of spaceflight.
Albania signed the Artemis Accords at NASA Headquarters on September 21, 2026, becoming the 73rd nation to join the U.S.-led framework for peaceful, transparent space exploration.
Read the story →NASA added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX's commercial crew contract for $946 million, bringing Dragon to 17 missions and a $5.92 billion total, with work running through 2030.
Europe's Vega-C flew two Earth Explorers at once for the first time on September 15, deploying ESA's fluorescence-mapping FLEX satellite and the Sentinel-3C ocean-and-atmosphere monitor from French Guiana.
NASA says its Sentinel-6 satellite pair, flying 30 seconds apart, is cross-checking ocean-height data during a strong, late-arriving 2026 El Niño just as hurricane season peaks.
ESA and commercial station firm Vast signed an agreement in Paris to fly Greek flight surgeon Adrianos Golemis to the ISS in 2027, pending medical certification, aboard a mission commanded by Thomas Pesquet.
NASA has directed Axiom Space to build a stripped-down 'Sortie Suit' after safety and oversight reviews warned the original lunar suit was too heavy and too complex to meet a 2028 landing.
NASA's Jessica Meir and ESA's Sophie Adenot spent 6.5 hours outside the ISS on Sept. 1, 2026, swapping hardware on Harmony and the truss in the sixth all-female spacewalk ever flown.
Turkey signed the Artemis Accords at NASA Headquarters on August 31, 2026, becoming the 71st nation to join the U.S.-led framework for norms in civil space exploration.
At a Tuscaloosa finale on Aug. 28, 2026, NASA and the University of Alabama handed out $1.325 million to teams that turned foam, plastic, and textile waste into materials astronauts could actually use on the Moon.
Four astronauts who flew farther from Earth than any humans since Apollo will join a list of roughly 30 recipients that includes Neil Armstrong and Alan Shepard.
NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot, the first French woman to spacewalk, spent over six hours removing a failed ISS antenna on August 18 but ran out of time to bolt in its replacement.
NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot are set for Aug. 18's U.S. Spacewalk 97 to swap a Z1 truss antenna that carries the station's high-speed link to Mission Control — Adenot's first EVA and a first for a French woman.
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