If you want to put people back on the moon, don't gut the agency in charge of getting them there. The senator wanted a promise. For the last six years--or maybe the last decade or quarter century, depending on how you count it--the United States and China had been locked in a space race, a contest to see which nation could put its people on the moon . Senator Ted Cruz wanted President Donald Trump's nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, to pledge that the US would not lose. Cruz brought a little surprise to Isaacman's confirmation hearing last April. It was a poster of the moon. On one side stood three astronauts and a giant Chinese flag. On the other were two more figures in space suits, with the tiniest Stars and Stripes planted in the lunar soil . Cruz apologized for the imbalance. "My team used ChatGPT," explained the senator, who chairs the committee that oversees NASA. Then Cruz, with a bit more seriousness, asked Isaacman, "Do we have your commitment that you will not allow the scenario on the right of this poster to happen? That China will not beat us to the moon?" Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who had paid for his own missions to space, replied, "Senator, I only see the left-hand portion of that poster."

The astronaut training tourists to fly in the world's first commercial space station Former NASA astronaut Drew Feustel now leads the astronaut training program for the private space company Vast, which aims to put its Haven-1 station into orbit in May. For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that's about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms. The first of those stations could be Haven-1, which the California-based company Vast aims to launch in May 2026. If all goes to plan, its earliest paying visitors will arrive about a month later. Drew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut, will help train them and get them up to speed ahead of their historic trip.

In 1986, we had huge leaps forward, tragic steps back, and life changing innovations. NASA's STS-51L crew members pose for photographs during a break in countdown training at the White Room, Launch Complex 39, Pad B. Left to right are Teacher-in-Space payload specialist Sharon Christa McAuliffe; payload specialist Gregory Jarvis; and astronauts Judith A. Resnik, mission specialist; Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, mission commander; Ronald E. McNair, mission specialist; Mike J. Smith, pilot; and Ellison S. Onizuka, mission specialist. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It was a year that saw roughly six million Americans hold hands in a continuous (more or less) line across the country to raise money for homelessness. A news anchor named Oprah Winfrey debuted her new talk show.

How a 1993 plan to launch ads into space turned into a national freakout. In the 1990s, space was for sale. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 1993, Mike Lawson, an aerospace entrepreneur based in Roswell, Georgia, unveiled his vision for a brave new future of advertising: space billboards. This wasn't a half-baked scheme: Lawson had meticulous plans for a proposed 1996 launch: His team of engineers would shoot a package of tightly-wound mylar into orbit about 180 miles above the Earth.

Boeing's Next Starliner Flight Will Only Be Allowed to Carry Cargo After a high-profile malfunction left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, NASA is requiring rigorous testing before humans get back on board. The US space agency ended months of speculation about the next flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, confirming that the vehicle will carry only cargo to the International Space Station. NASA and Boeing are now targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, the space agency said. Launching by next April will require completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities, NASA added in a statement . "NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in a statement.

We study question answering in the domain of radio regulations, a legally sensitive and high-stakes area. We propose a telecom-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline and introduce, to our knowledge, the first multiple-choice evaluation set for this domain, constructed from authoritative sources using automated filtering and human validation. To assess retrieval quality, we define a domain-specific retrieval metric, under which our retriever achieves approximately 97% accuracy. Beyond retrieval, our approach consistently improves generation accuracy across all tested models. In particular, while naively inserting documents without structured retrieval yields only marginal gains for GPT-4o (less than 1%), applying our pipeline results in nearly a 12% relative improvement. These findings demonstrate that carefully targeted grounding provides a simple yet strong baseline and an effective domain-specific solution for regulatory question answering. All code and evaluation scripts, along with our derived question-answer dataset, are available at https://github.com/Zakaria010/Radio-RAG.

The latest addition to China's Tiangong space station is an AI chatbot with expertise in navigation and tactical planning. Named Wukong AI--after the protagonist of the "Monkey King" legend in Chinese mythology, Sun Wukong--the chatbot was introduced on the space station in mid-July, and has already completed its first mission: supporting three taikonauts during a spacewalk. Information about Wukong AI remains limited. Chinese authorities have said that they developed it from a domestic open-source AI model; according to Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, engineers designed it to meet the requirements of manned space missions, and focused its knowledge-base on aerospace flight data. "This system can provide rapid and effective information support for complex operations and fault handling by crew members, improving work efficiency, in-orbit psychological support, and coordination between space and ground teams," Zou Pengfei of the taikonaut training center, told Xinhua.

It's the job that puts the average 9–5 to shame. But while being an astronaut is a career many dream of, you might wonder how well it pays. Compared to office workers – who may complain about their commute – these highly–trained individuals are regularly launched into space at 17,500mph. While Earth-based employees might not rate their office canteen or grumble about the lack of toilets in the workplace, astronauts live off dehydrated food packets and must use specially–designed bathrooms. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that astronauts get paid a hefty wage for their daredevil profession.

This paper presents a multimodal control framework based on spiking neural networks (SNNs) for robotic arms aboard space stations. It is designed to cope with the constraints of limited onboard resources while enabling autonomous manipulation and material transfer in space operations. By combining geometric states with tactile and semantic information, the framework strengthens environmental awareness and contributes to more robust control strategies. To guide the learning process progressively, a dual-channel, three-stage curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) scheme is further integrated into the system. The framework was tested across a range of tasks including target approach, object grasping, and stable lifting with wall-mounted robotic arms, demonstrating reliable performance throughout. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms baseline approaches in both task success rate and energy efficiency. These findings highlight its suitability for real-world aerospace applications.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy explains how the agency's Artemis program aims to return Americans to the Moon on'Hannity.' Amid significant budget cuts, NASA is fast-tracking the development of nuclear reactors on the moon and next-generation space stations with one clear objective: beating U.S. adversaries in the new space race. Two new memos signed by interim NASA chief and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy outline a bold strategy to secure strategic ground on the moon. The centerpiece of this effort is a lunar nuclear reactor, a renewable and stable power source to support long-term exploration. "The goal is to power everything," a senior NASA official told Fox News Digital. "Our systems, habitats, rovers, robotic equipment, even future mining operations -- everything we want to do on the moon depends on this."