Space News: JWST budget cuts, why Starship broke up, and Artemis II stacking

Welcome to Ad Astra’s weekly space news! Each Tuesday, I’ll focus on a few important news stories that I’m not ready to cover in depth, but are relevant. I will sometimes write about developing stories; other times I may wait a week or two so I can cover something with a little more context and information (such as the SpaceX/Blue Origin story below.) These are all spaceflight and space policy related, but I will also cover science here — it’s just been a nonstop year so far.

While this Tuesday newsletter is currently free, it will go behind a paywall later this year. If you’d like to support my work before then, feel free to visit my Patreon.

Two big launches, two mishap investigations

There were two big launches on January 16: Blue Origin and SpaceX. Both ended up with mishap investigations from the FAA.

What happened: Blue Origin launched their New Glenn rocket for the first time on January 16, successfully reaching orbit and deploying their test payload. The first stage, intended to be reusable, successfully performed a re-entry burn, but the company lost telemetry and was unable to land the booster on their waiting ship. Despite this problem, the primary goal was to reach orbit and the launch was considered a success.

(That being said, considering they delayed the launch twice due to weather for the recovery vessel, I think they really wanted to land that booster on the first try.)

Meanwhile, SpaceX launched the seventh test flight of their Starship vehicle and megarocket, also on January 16. While these test flights have become somewhat routine, this one was anything but.

They did once again successfully dock the Super Heavy booster back at the launch site, but the vehicle Starship broke apart at about 146 km up. It was quite the shock, and definitely not expected.

What we’ve learned: We’re not currently sure why Blue Origin wasn’t able to land the New Glenn booster. The company is well known for being tight lipped about everything (Bloomberg space reporter Loren Grush was at the launch and said that they didn’t even provide the media a viewing location for the launch, opting instead to put them inside a windowless conference room with a livestream playing, which is truly bewildering.) Blue Origin hasn’t released any information about what might have happened.

SpaceX is much more forthcoming with information than Blue Origin (but is often still frustrating, it’s all relative). The suspicion here, according to the CEO, is that it was a propellant and oxidizer leak on Starship that led to the breakup of the ship.

The FAA is requiring a mishap investigation for both flights. The traditional way that mishap investigations work is that basically, when anything goes awry during a launch or landing, the FAA automatically opens a mishap investigation. It’s not necessarily a huge deal. The FAA requires the company to basically investigate itself (which sounds bad, but if you think about it, a company can figure out what went wrong a lot more quickly, easily, and cheaply than the FAA can, coming in and doing a separate investigation.)

The companies will submit their reports to the FAA on what went wrong and the fix — if the FAA agrees, and determines there is no threat to the public, then both will be allowed to fly again. But until this happens, both rockets are grounded.

It’s important to note that the FAA is also investigating reports that debris fell outside the designated areas for the Starship flight. The FAA sent me this statement:

A debris response area is only activated if debris falls outside of the closed hazard aircraft areas.

SpaceX unsurprisingly disagrees, claiming on their website:

“Starship flew within its designated launch corridor – as all U.S. launches do to safeguard the public both on the ground, on water and in the air. Any surviving pieces of debris would have fallen into the designated hazard area.”

Meanwhile, there are ongoing investigations on Turks and Caicos of property damage due to falling Starship debris. As of right now, there are no reports of injuries.

Why it matters: Blue Origin has long been poised to be the big competition for SpaceX, and it’s badly needed. SpaceX dominates the launch market globally, and it would be great for the industry to have a viable alternative to their services. But Blue Origin has constantly underwhelmed and underperformed over the years. This launch may signal that the company is ready to make an impact in the orbital launch market.

The destruction of Starship is certainly a setback for SpaceX, but not a significant one. The areas this will matter most are in public perception of the company (which, let’s face it, is probably at a well-deserved all-time low considering the CEO’s recent actions), as well as in debris impacts and the brief impact to air traffic. There’s generally a sense that SpaceX thinks it can do whatever it wants, with minimal repercussions, and that’s not entirely inaccurate, especially given the political environment.

Additionally, considering that this was a much bigger problem than SpaceX having to drop a booster in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the launch site, it’s very possible the mishap investigation might awhile and SpaceX will have to wait until it’s completed to fly their next test flight.

But also, given the current administration’s stance on regulation, it’s also very possible they will be flying again very soon. With current events the way they are, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict what’s going to happen.

Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist and launch king

If you’re feeling powerless right now, and you want to do something that will make an impact, I have a GoFundMe for you.

What happened: If you love space and are at all active online, you are probably familiar with Jonathan McDowell. Well, he’s retiring and needs to move his extensive library of books, binders, and the stuff of space nerd dreams to a new home in the UK. To do that, he needs about $100,000 — and he’s 3/4 of the way there at the time of this writing. Jonathan’s work is so important, and I want to make sure to support him in any way I can.

Why it matters: Jonathan is an astrophysicist by day, but by night he writes Jonathan’s Space Report, which tracks all launches. He also maintains a catalog of Starlink satellites and all kinds of other space objects. When something from space burns up in the atmosphere, or worse, lands somewhere on Earth, every space reporter turns to Jonathan to ask, “What the hell was that?”

He does this for free in his spare time, and as a space journalist, I can’t overstate how incredible his work is, nor how genuinely kind he is. This is a project I want to support, both for professional reasons (he makes my job easier) and personal ones (he’s just the best.) And as someone who does a lot of work for free, like this newsletter, I have a deep understanding of how much love must go into a project like this.

Dr. Philip Metzger, moon dirt specialist

Over at New Scientist, I interviewed Dr. Philip Metzger, who’s one of the foremost experts on lunar regolith (better known as moon dirt!)

Getting the Artemis II rocket ready

All kinds of disruptions are happening right now in the federal government, thanks to the wave of executive orders from the past week+, but one thing that has continued is the stacking of SLS for Artemis II.

What happened: This week, NASA completed stacking six of the 10 segments of the solid rocket boosters, which are the white boosters flanking the orange rocket core.

Artemis II is the second flight of the Artemis program to return humans to the moon, and it will be the first flight with crew, but they will not land on the moon. It’s currently scheduled for April 2026; it was previously scheduled for September 2025, but in December NASA delayed the flight because of the investigation into the problems with Orion’s heat shield.

Why it matters: There’s been a lot of speculation about whether the incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman will cancel SLS (I’ve absolutely been contributing to this speculation, by the way) or even whether they’ll cancel Artemis altogether. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe that huge changes are coming to NASA, and both SLS and Artemis are in danger of cancellation.

However, my suspicion is that, at minimum, Artemis II will move forward as scheduled simply because they’ve gotten so far. We’re just over a year away from this launch, the hardware is almost ready, it would be a big triumph for this administration to get a crewed Artemis flight off the ground. There is no other human-rated operational rocket that could accomplish this mission, as of right now.

(That being said, neither Jared Isaacman nor President Trump seem to be ones to consider sunk costs as overly relevant, so I could be completely wrong about this and they may indeed fully cancel both SLS and Artemis.)

Now there are JWST funding cuts!?!

Honestly, this one is just unpleasant. I picked this up from Jeff Foust’s report at SpaceNews, but the bottom line is that JWST — the incredible telescope that cost $10 billion (at the time of launch), is in its third year of observations, and is outperforming all expectations — may be facing a significant budget cut.

What happened: According to a town hall presentation from Tom Brown, the head of the mission office for JWST at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), NASA has advised STScI (the organization that operates JWST) that there may be around a 20 percent budget cut for fiscal year 2026 (which beings on October 2025). We don’t have NASA’s FY 2026 budget request yet; the FY 2025 request came out in March 2024.

There are a few reasons this is happening. First, the operations costs for JWST were set in 2011, and they were much lower than the actual costs of operating the observatory. Second, actual inflation was much higher than what was accounted for in these cost estimates. This means that even with flat top-level funding, the team has less money to worth with. And third, NASA is facing across the board cuts to its science budgets because it’s operating in a limited budget environment.

Why it matters: I don’t think I need to tell you that a 20% cut to JWST operating costs when it’s still in the first five years of its mission would be devastating. Demand for time on this observatory is off the charts, and we’re learning amazing things that crosses science disciplines from it. It’s unreal to think that we spent this much money on a flagship observatory, and then NASA just can’t come up with the money for the operational budget during its primary mission.

And this isn’t the first we’ve heard of about budget constraints for NASA’s big science missions. The list is, sadly, starting to feel endless. From the cancellation of Chandra to budget cuts for Hubble to the cancellation of VIPER to the laughable situation around Mars Sample Return, some have started to ask whether science is even a priority anymore. It seems like the only thing that isn’t dealing with budget issues is Artemis — and it’s not like that program is exactly going well. NASA’s in a terrible budget environment, and the organization is having to make difficult choices, but it’s hard to reconcile this one.

And if you’re wondering, “Well, maybe if NASA cancels SLS and Artemis that will be good because there’s more money for these scientific program,” well, that’s not really how NASA’s budget works. SLS gets funding because members of Congress like SLS (mostly because it provides jobs in their particular states). If SLS were to be canceled (which would be a mess, frankly, because again, a lot of Congress likes the program), then NASA wouldn’t get to spend that money elsewhere. It would be removed from NASA’s budget altogether.

It’s a tricky situation, made altogether more complicated by the fact that the incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has publicly expressed dismay at the cuts to Chandra and Hubble, which means all of this could change once he’s confirmed.

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