Small Space News Story Roundup 57

Calling one of these "small" might be underselling it... 

Rocket Lab's CEO Peter Beck sees his market segment as healthy and robust

In an April 7th interview in Colorado Springs and reported in SpaceNews, Beck said his company has found a successful market providing dedicated launches for small satellites — a strategy that he said does not directly compete with SpaceX rideshare missions. 

...Beck said the customers for his company’s Electron rockets are different from those seeking less expensive launches on SpaceX’s Transporter and Bandwagon lines of Falcon 9 rideshare launches.

He explained, “Dedicated small launch is a real market, and it should not be confused with rideshare.  It’s totally different.”  

He said Rocket Lab is experiencing growing demand for Electron from companies who want control over their schedule and orbit, traits that a dedicated launch offers over a rideshare. This has included customers such as Kinéis, a French company that launched its constellation of 25 Internet-of-Things satellites across five Electron missions, and Japanese radar mapping companies iQPS and Synspective.

Something I found particularly interesting is his disdain for the "one ton to orbit" sized boosters that were the subject of headlines just under three years ago.  

That skepticism extends to a new line of European small launch vehicles, like Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum, which crashed less than a minute after liftoff on its inaugural flight March 30. Spectrum and some other vehicles there are targeting about one ton to orbit, which he described as a “no man’s land” of performance: “It’s too small to be a useful rideshare mission, and it’s too big to be a useful dedicated rocket” for smallsats.

We've mentioned Rocket Lab's development of their bigger payload rocket, Neutron. SpaceNews reports development is proceeding and the first Neutron launch looks to be before the end of this year.  Beck remarked that they've used all the lessons they learned getting their Electron to 50 launches faster than any other company's rocket on Neutron, adding, “It’s way easier to build a bigger rocket than it is a little rocket.”

The fight over NASA's budget begins

This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.  Let's just say the opposition can't figure out what to burn, carve a swastika onto, or whom to assassinate. 

In the "big picture" context, the budget is cut by 20 percent, so effectively $5 billion from an overall total of about $25 billion.  What people are upset about is that the cuts seem to be centered on the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more. 

According to the "passback" documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency's science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
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Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.

While the Science Mission Directorate continues funding the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (or HST and JWST), the cuts are seen as killing the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, widely considered a more modern version of the Hubble and a possible replacement for the HST rather than the Webb.  The HST was deployed 35 years ago this month: April 25, 1990. Not only has it been in orbit approaching 35 years, it has had many technical problems.  

The kicker is that the Roman Telescope is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years.  Saying the cuts are going to kill off an already assembled successor because of budget cuts, instead of not funding other programs that are much closer to their beginnings doesn't make much sense.  

Other significant cuts include ending funding for Mars Sample Return as well as the DAVINCI mission to Venus. The budget cuts also appear intended to force the closure of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the agency has 10,000 civil servants and contractors.

Note that the Mars Sample Return mission doesn't exist as anything beyond very preliminary documents.  I've seen mention of DAVINCI mission to Venus "in the late 2020s to early 2030s," but that's all. 

Naturally, this is seen as handing China the moon - if not the entire solar system - and the end of everything.  Science policy experts have been characterizing such cuts as an "extinction level" event for what is seen as the crown jewel of the space agency.

Nearly all of NASA's most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs, including feats such as Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, and Cassini's discovery of water plumes on Enceladus.
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"This massive cut to NASA Science will not stand," US Rep. George Whitesides, D-California, told Ars. "For weeks we have been raising the alarm about a rumored 50 percent cut to NASA's world-leading science efforts. Now we know it is true. I will work alongside my colleagues on the Science Committee to make clear how this would decimate American leadership in space and inflict great damage to NASA centers across the country."

Since congress hasn't passed a "real" Federal Budget since 2009 (article from 2012 talking about that), I lean toward thinking that they're not likely to pass this one, either.  Instead, we'll get some number of continuing resolutions to authorize some spending or other. 

An illustration of the field of view of Roman Space Telescope vs. the Hubble Space Telescope.  From the NASA Roman mission website.