Congress Funds New Lunar Race

🚀 US Senate boosts NASA's Moon race

🌱 Moon dirt grows chickpeas!

🌌 Gravitational wave detections surge

🛰️ Mars hit by solar superstorm

💥 Japan rocket launch explodes

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation advanced The NASA Authorization Act of 2026, providing new strategic direction for the agency's Artemis program and other key space exploration initiatives.

The legislation formally endorses Administrator Isaacman’s revised Artemis plan, extends the ISS lifetime until 2032, removes commercial launch procurement caps, and prioritizes a surface Moon base over a lunar gateway.

This bill signals strong political will to accelerate lunar efforts, giving NASA leadership greater flexibility and resources to counter China's growing ambitions at the Moon's south pole, according to policy analysts.

University of Texas at Austin scientists, collaborating with Texas A&M, successfully cultivated and harvested the 'Myles' variety of chickpea using a simulated lunar regolith to test sustainable agriculture concepts.

The team used Exolith Labs simulant mixed with vermicompost, finding that chickpeas inoculated with arbuscular mycorrhizae fungi produced a harvest in mixtures containing up to 75% moon dirt.

This research advances in-situ resource utilization for long-duration missions, offering a potential food source, although lead author Sara Santos notes that nutritional and heavy metal uptake analyses are still pending.

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration published its Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0, adding 128 new candidate detections from its fourth observing run and more than doubling the number of known cosmic merger events.

The catalog includes unusual events such as GW231028_153006, a binary with high inspiral spin, and GW231123_135430, the heaviest black hole binary detected to date, with each object roughly 130 solar masses.

According to LVK member Rachel Gray, this larger dataset improves the independent measurement of the Hubble constant and provides more extreme scenarios to test Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

European Space Agency (ESA) scientists used the Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) to observe the direct atmospheric impact of the massive May 2024 solar superstorm on Mars.

Using a radio occultation technique, the orbiters measured a dramatic 278% increase in electrons at a 130 km altitude, while TGO’s radiation monitor recorded an extremely high dose over 64 hours.

Lead author Jacob Parrott states these findings reveal how solar events deposit energy into the Martian atmosphere, providing critical data on atmospheric loss and improving space weather forecasting for future missions.

Japanese startup Space One attempted the third test flight of its Kairos rocket from Spaceport Kii, aiming to deliver five small satellites into orbit and validate its commercial launch system.

The 18-meter, solid-fuel rocket lifted off successfully but experienced a critical anomaly, forcing the company to implement flight termination measures approximately two minutes into the flight, resulting in the vehicle's destruction.

This third consecutive failure poses a major challenge to Space One's ambitious plans to achieve a launch cadence of 20 missions per year, impacting its credibility in the small-satellite launch sector.