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
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.
