Plus: Industry reacts to a possible SpaceX IPO
Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, the National Academies called for crewed Mars science missions, industry reacts to SpaceX's possible IPO, Jared Isaacman's NASA nomination moves a step closer and more.
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OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust The search for past or present life should be the top science objective of future human missions to Mars, a new National Academies report concludes.
The report, "A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars," identifies 11 top science objectives for human Mars missions and outlines four campaigns of missions to achieve them. NASA's science and exploration directorates commissioned the study.
The highest-priority objective is searching for evidence of past or present life on Mars. "This is the millennia-old question: Are we alone in the universe?" said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and co-chair of the study committee, during a Dec. 9 briefing.
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CIVIL
| The Senate Commerce Committee advanced the nomination of Jared Isaacman to be NASA administrator to the full Senate in an 18-10 vote Dec. 8. All 15 Republican members voted in favor, along with three Democrats: Maria Cantwell of Washington, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.
Two Shenzhou-21 astronauts embarked on the mission's first spacewalk late Monday, inspecting and photographing a damaged spacecraft window which triggered an earlier emergency launch.
NASA has lost contact with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, a spacecraft that has circled the planet for more than a decade, collecting science data and serving as a key communications relay.
| MILITARY
| | Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will have to complete four successful orbital flights as its pathway to certification under the U.S. Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant said Dec. 10 at the Spacepower conference.
LeoLabs said Dec. 9 it won an interagency contract to provide space-surveillance data for the U.S. government, supporting adversarial spacecraft monitoring and the TraCSS orbital traffic coordination platform due to enter full service early next year. | | |
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COMMERCIAL
| | Other space companies are likely to move toward the public markets now that Elon Musk is openly signaling plans to pursue a SpaceX IPO next year, hoping to ride the wave of momentum behind a potentially record-breaking listing.
K2 Space said Dec. 11 it raised $250 million in new funding that values the satellite manufacturing startup at $3 billion. The Series C round was led by Redpoint, with additional backing from accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Hedosophia, Altimeter, Lightspeed and Alpine Space Ventures. |
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 | SPONSORED CONTENT
| By Muon Space For decades, building a space mission meant a hard choice between two imperfect models.
The first was the traditional prime: capable, proven, and thorough, but slow and expensive. Customers paid hundreds of millions, waited years, and in return got a fully integrated, bespoke spacecraft.
The second model arrived with the much-touted promises of "new space": smaller satellites, lower-cost launches, modular buses, and plug-and-play payloads that would spark a revolution in orbit. But those promises have only been partially realized. Early hopes of democratizing space ran up against a simple truth: integration is hard. New space offered components at lower cost, but it still sold standardized buses, not missions. The burden of integrating spacecraft, payloads, software, networks, and operations remained exactly where it had always been: on the customer. |
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 | Latest Press Releases
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