Plus: Congress rejects NASA budget cuts
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Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, a medical issue on the ISS is prompting an early return for Crew-11, a Senate "minibus" appropriations package rejects steep cuts to NASA's budget and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust NASA has decided to bring home four members of the International Space Station crew because of a medical issue with one of them, marking the first time NASA has cut short a mission because of crew health.
At a Jan. 8 briefing, NASA announced that the Crew-11 mission, which has been at the ISS since early August, will return to Earth in the "coming days" in response to a medical incident involving one of the crewmembers. Agency officials declined to go into details about the person involved or the nature of the medical concern, citing privacy issues, but added that the individual was stable.
| | | | | | | CIVIL
| | House and Senate appropriators have released the text of a final appropriations bill for fiscal 2026 that largely rejects the steep cuts the Trump administration proposed for NASA. The "minibus" appropriations package, released Jan. 5 by the leadership of the House and Senate appropriations committees, provides $24.438 billion for NASA in fiscal 2026. That's slightly less than the $24.875 billion the agency received in 2024 and again in 2025 under a full-year continuing resolution.
China's astronaut corps has completed a near month-long underground cave training, conducted in part to prepare for future crewed lunar landing missions. A team of 28 astronauts was divided into four groups, with each taking turns spending sessions of six days and five nights in cold, humid underground conditions.
NASA expects to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as soon as September, citing the mission as evidence the agency can do flagship major science missions on time and within budget. The telescope is fully assembled and housed in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
| | COMMERCIAL
| | L3Harris Technologies said Jan. 5 it will sell a 60% stake in the company's Space Propulsion and Power Systems business, valued at $845 million, to private equity firm AE Industrial Partners.
Landspace, one of China's leading launch startups, has had its application for an initial public offering accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market. Landspace is seeking to raise around $1 billion (7.5 billion yuan) to support its drive to develop and scale reusable launch services.
The billionaire-backed philanthropic organization Schmidt Sciences is funding the development of a series of new observatories, including a space telescope larger than Hubble that its backers say can be built at a fraction of the cost and on a much faster schedule. | | | | | | | LAUNCH
| | Indra Group, the majority owner of satellite operator Hisdesat, announced Jan. 2 that the SpainSat NG 2 satellite "suffered the impact of a space particle" while maneuvering to its final position in geostationary orbit.
SpaceX plans to lower the orbits of some of its Starlink satellites, a move the company says is intended to improve space safety following two recent incidents. The change will affect about 4,400 satellites out of nearly 9,400 currently in orbit. | | | | | |  | Latest Press Releases
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