Plus: White House nominates a new Space Force chief
Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, Congress pushed back on NASA budget cuts, the White House nominated a replacement for Gen. Chance Saltzman, cracking continues to cause issues on the International Space Station and more.
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OUR TOP STORY
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By Jeff Foust A House appropriations subcommittee advanced a spending bill April 30 that would keep overall NASA funding at 2026 levels, rejecting a 23% cut proposed by the White House.
The House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) Subcommittee approved a fiscal year 2027 spending bill on an 8-6 vote that fell along party lines. The bill goes to the full committee for a markup session scheduled for May 13.
The bill, released by the committee April 29, provided $24.438 billion for NASA, the same amount the agency received in fiscal year 2026. The White House had proposed $18.829 billion for NASA in 2027.
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CIVIL
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At an April 29 meeting of the International Space Station Advisory Council, Bob Cabana, the chairman of the committee, said the cause of cracking in PrK, a vestibule in the Zvezda service module that links a docking port with the rest of the station, remains under investigation.
A manufacturing issue involving a European company has resulted in corrosion in modules produced for both the lunar Gateway and Axiom Space’s commercial space station. The modules in question were the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, or HALO, being developed by Northrop Grumman, and the European Space Agency’s International Habitat, or I-Hab, module.
NASA is reserving a small amount of space on a Mars telecommunications spacecraft for science, which could be one or more cubesats. NASA issued a draft request for proposals April 2 for the Mars Telecommunications Network, a mission to serve as a communications relay at Mars for other spacecraft there.
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MILITARY
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President Donald Trump has nominated Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess for promotion to four-star general and selected him to become the next chief of space operations. If confirmed, Schiess would succeed Gen. Chance Saltzman, who has led the Space Force since September 2022.
DARPA has selected three companies for Phase 1 of the Lunar Assay via Small Satellite Orbiter (LASSO) program. LASSO would demonstrate the ability to operate in a very low orbit around the moon while searching for water ice. The companies are Benchmark Space Systems, Quantum Space and Revolution Space.
The Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request allocates more than $8 billion for so-called moving target indicator, or MTI, systems — satellites designed to follow objects on the ground and in the air in near real time. |
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COMMERCIAL
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York Space Systems plans to acquire satellite communications terminal provider All.Space in a deal valued at about $355 million, expanding the company’s reach beyond spacecraft manufacturing into user equipment and network connectivity.
Overview Energy, a startup developing space-based solar power systems, and Meta announced April 27 an agreement under which Overview will transmit up to one gigawatt of power that will be used by Meta data centers when other sources of energy, like terrestrial solar power, are unavailable.
U.S. defense space startup True Anomaly announced April 28 it raised $650 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at $2.2 billion. The financing coincides with the company’s entry into the Pentagon’s Golden Dome program, an effort to develop space-based interceptors designed to counter missile threats. |
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FROM SPACENEWS |
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