| By Mike Gruss
For my money, no Christmas song is more guilt-inducing than when John Lennon sings that the year is over and asks "what have you done?"
The end of the calendar year is a good time to be reflective. But also, what have you done?
At SpaceNews, we published more than 1,700 stories and 68 podcasts. We launched new newsletters and expanded global coverage while producing 17 web events and three in-person events.
And you? Based on our analytics, I put together a short list of the stories you read most and grouped them into themes. It is not a perfect system but it does provide an unscientific look at what readers were interested in. Some big news is left out (for example, Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 mission which landed on the moon). But it's still a snapshot (for better or worse) of what 2025 was.
1. Cuts to NASA's budget and workforce
NASA confirmed in March that it was cutting $420 million in contracts that were identified as redundant or not aligned with core principles as part of the Department of Government Efficiency. Then in May, the agency announced it was closing three offices and laying off their staff as a first step in broader workforce reductions at the agency ordered by the Trump administration. Later that month, NASA released more information about its proposed fiscal year 2026 budget, outlining new investments in exploration at the expense of canceling dozens of science missions and cutting thousands of jobs. The top-level budget of $18.8 billion represented a cut of about a quarter from the nearly $24.9 billion it received in fiscal year 2025. It marked the sharpest year-over-year cut proposed for NASA and would bring the agency's budget down to lows not seen since1961, when corrected for inflation.
In July, the House pushed back, releasing a draft spending bill that would keep NASA's overall budget flat in fiscal year 2026 but shift money to exploration from science and other accounts. In October, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced it would lay off 550 employees, the latest round of job cuts at the space science center.
2. Questions about Starship, questions about Artemis
In late May, SpaceX released details about the cause of the Flight 8 mishap, when several Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage shut down and the vehicle started to tumble. The timing of that failure was similar to Flight 7 in January, which also featured several engine shutdowns and a loss of communications about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. Starship testing and development has progressed since then, but not without raising tough questions about SpaceX's ability to fulfill Artemis mission objectives.
By late October, two former NASA administrators criticized the agency's approach to using SpaceX's Starship for the Artemis 3 crewed lunar landing, calling for an urgent redirection to reach the moon before China.
SpaceX responded by saying it was developing a "simplified" lunar landing mission architecture while defending the progress it has made on its Starship lander for Artemis.
3. Concerns about China and Russia's activities in space
One theme this year was the heightened rhetoric of space as a warfighting domain while specifically pointing to China and Russia's behavior in space. That included a discussion of how Russia and China are stepping up efforts to counter the dominance of commercial satellite constellations, particularly SpaceX's Starlink. In addition, Australian company HEO imaged and modeled a mystery Chinese satellite prior to its reentry into Earth's atmosphere, revealing previously unknown details about the spacecraft. In July, a Chinese Shiyan satellite appeared in a low-inclination orbit never before used by the country, after a week-long detection delay and uncertainty over its mission.
With mounting concerns about space conflict and vulnerabilities, the United States has redoubled its own efforts, with military leaders explicitly calling for "weapons" instead of assets, and embracing dual-use technologies.
4. The creation of the Golden Dome missile defense program
In February, the Pentagon quietly renamed the Trump administration's ambitious national missile defense initiative from "Iron Dome for America" to "Golden Dome for America." It kicked off a year of massive spending and jostling for position among industry. The White House suggested that the program would cost $175 billion and take about three years, but outside speculation and analysis suggests that both values are significant underestimations. At the top of the list of challenges to overcome are the widespread land, air, sea and space-based communication and data integration network that needs to be built, as well as the space-based interceptor technology that needs to be contracted, developed and fielded. Details remain scarce, but the Space Force has recently contracted companies for prototype interceptors.
5. Launch failures
Hundreds of launches succeeded this year. And because of that success, it made failures or tests gone wrong feel more newsworthy. In March, the first launch of Isar Aerospace' Spectrum rocket failed when the vehicle lost attitude control seconds after liftoff and plummeted back to Earth, but the company still considered the launch a successful test flight. Then in April, a Firefly Alpha rocket malfunctioned during a launch, preventing a Lockheed Martin technology demonstration satellite on board from reaching orbit. In June, a new version of the solid rocket booster being developed for the Space Launch System experienced an anomaly during a test firing in Utah. Multiple SpaceX Starships exploded at various stages of testing, Japan's flagship H3 rocket lost its satellite payload after a second stage issue and struggled with reusable rocket tests, reaching orbit with its first Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A rockets, neither of which successfully landed.
It's easy to expect all of these themes to be relevant in 2026.
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