Articles

The Downlink

Saturn’s icy moon invites further study, and The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 spacecraft celebrates an anniversary.

The Downlink

Reminisce about the influential Viking missions, picture seeing your all-time favorites on your wall, and get excited for what’s to come.

The Downlink

China’s Zhurong Mars rover snaps a selfie and gets a bird’s-eye-view pic from above, and asteroid hunters of all kinds look out for dangerous rocks.

The Downlink

Venus is an intimidating destination for spacecraft, and we’re pretty sure Earth hasn’t yet been a destination for aliens.

The Downlink

Look at eclipses from the perspective of Earth, the Moon, and beyond. Plus catch up on the week’s space news.

Casey Dreier

This is the 2nd-largest budget proposal for the space agency in 25 years. It embraces a broad set of NASA programs, including Artemis to the Moon, important science initiatives, and a healthy space technology effort.

The Downlink

Listen to the sounds of the Whirlpool Galaxy and look back at our earliest picture of it.

Casey Dreier

Planetary Society priorities, including Mars Sample Return and the Roman Space Telescope, were funded by Congress in its NASA budget. But Project Artemis's human landing system received only a fraction of its requested amount, pushing a return to the Moon further into the 2020s.

Casey Dreier

This unique, comprehensive dataset includes the full budget history, by year, of every NASA planetary science mission and related activities.

Casey Dreier

A new budget submission from the White House would continue record-high funding for planetary science, but proposes deep cuts to 2 productive Mars missions and defers funding for deep space telescope dedicated to finding hazardous near-Earth objects.

Casey Dreier

NASA's final 2020 budget rejected every major cut proposed by the Trump Administration, increased funding for popular congressional projects such as the Space Launch System, and underfunded several key administration proposals, including a human-qualified lunar lander and low-Earth orbit commercialization projects.

Casey Dreier

A bigger budgetary pie allows the space agency's budget to grow—for one year at least.

Casey Dreier

How much did Project Apollo cost? Planetary Society experts answered that question by revisiting primary sources and reconstructing Apollo's entire cost history from 1960 - 1973.

Casey Dreier

The White House released a long-awaited supplemental budget request for NASA today. It proposes an additional $1.6 billion for an accelerated human spaceflight effort to land on the Moon in 2024. This boosts the President's budget request for NASA to $22.6 billion in fiscal year 2020, which is approximately $1.1 billion or 5% more than the amount provided by Congress last year.

Brendan Curry

Highlights from the hearing, 'Keeping our Sights on Mars: A Review of NASA's Deep Space Plans' held on May 8th in the House of Representatives.

Brendan Curry

On March 27, 2019, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies held a hearing titled, “NASA’s FY 2020 Budget Request.”

Casey Dreier

The President's Budget Request for NASA in 2020 would start a Mars Sample Return mission and ramp up efforts to send humans to the Moon. But it would still kick off the first year of a new decade with a half-billion dollar cut to the space agency.

Casey Dreier

After months of unrelated political turmoil, multiple stop-gap spending bills, and an unprecedented government shutdown, NASA's 2019 budget was finally signed into law.

Casey Dreier

If ever there was an example of how quickly political winds can shift, look no further than the sudden end to a seemingly endless government shutdown on January 25th.

Casey Dreier

The partial government shutdown that shuttered NASA continues with no end in sight. The U.S. space program sits idle, the vast majority of its workforce sent home. Space science and exploration projects are disrupted. Paychecks are absent. And an unsettling realization has dawned on hundreds of thousands of public employees and contractors affected by the shutdown: this time is different.