All posts tagged "Nasa"

An analyst says that a MAGA power struggle has ensued over President Donald Trump's pick and Elon Musk — and now "loyalties are being tested."

Musk, the richest man in the world who has previously called himself "first buddy," criticized Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Trump's pick for interim administrator of National Aeronautics and Space Administration, writes Salon's Sophia Tesfaye. The move reveals how "the team he assembled has been besieged by a series of internal disputes. Now another MAGA power struggle has spilled into public view, laying bare the movement’s dissonance about power and progress."

"Musk, who had a rather messy departure from his official government role in May, is once again making waves with a social media broadside against another Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy," Tesfaye writes. "With Trump’s man is under attack by the MAGA movement’s favorite billionaire, loyalties are being tested."
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Samantha Handler with Punchbowl News live-tweeted as the Senate Appropriations Committee "plunged into chaos" Thursday over budget markups on the Commerce, Justice, Science bill that includes funding for NASA and the new FBI headquarters.

In an article on the debacle, Handler, John Bresnahan, and Laura Weiss wrote, "The Senate Appropriations Committee often passes each of its 12 annual spending bills on a bipartisan basis. This is what makes the Senate the Senate — and not the House.

"Yet the Senate Appropriations panel has its first FY2026 markup this morning, and senators still don’t have a deal on what they want to spend this year. There’s also no sense that they’ll be able to reach one."...

President Donald Trump wants to cut NASA's budget by 24%, but senators on both sides of the aisle claim that would have devastating consequences on the agency's ability to advance vital scientific research, Bloomberg reported.

In addition, the president is seeking to slash NASA's science portfolio funding "nearly in half" while canceling "dozens of science missions," the report stated.

But during an appropriations committee hearing this week, Republicans and Democrats alike dismissed Trump's cuts, and proposed their own $24.9 billion budget for 2026, which is "roughly" the same amount NASA received for 2025....

Donald Trump may believe the U.S. has a "manifest destiny" to travel to Mars before the end of his second term, but technology and timing are against him, according to analysis by MSNBC.

MSNBC editor Ryan Teague Beckwith noted that Trump's inaugural address included a promise to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars” and “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” but the president's adherence to the details needed to get there has been less than stellar.

"Trump clearly wants some kind of a space triumph," Beckwith wrote. "He created the Space Force and said he wanted to go to Mars by the end of his first term. He said at a rally...in October that America would go to Mars before the end of his second term, though he didn’t specify whether that meant an unmanned spacecraft or actual American space boots on the ground."...

Two U.S. astronauts who arrived at the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner will have to return home with rival SpaceX, NASA said Saturday.

“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February, and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told reporters.

The return of Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams has been delayed by thruster malfunctions of the Boeing spacecraft....

The NASA astronaut knocks loudly three times on a what appears to be a nondescript door, and calls cheerfully: “You ready to come out?”

The reply is inaudible, but beneath his mask he appears to be grinning as he yanks the door open — and four scientists who have spent a year away from all other human contact, simulating a mission to Mars, spill out to cheers and applause.

Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and team leader Kelly Haston have spent the past 378 days sealed inside the “Martian” habitat in Houston, Texas, part of NASA’s research into what it will take to put humans on the Red Planet....