On Monday, Congress made good on those promises, releasing a $24.4 billion budget plan for NASA as part of the conferencing process, when House and Senate lawmakers convene to hammer out a final budget. The result is a budget that calls for just a 1 percent cut in NASA’s science funding, to $7.25 billion, for fiscal year 2026.

The U.S. space agency and the Department of Energy will work together to build a fission reactor on the lunar surface in the next four years

NASA says it is “very unlikely” the agency will be able to recover a Mars spacecraft that has been out of contact for more than a month.

Exploration advocates are pushing back against the planned cancellation of NASA's Mars sample return project, saying it could potentially find evidence of Red Planet life.

The bill would cut the Office of Fossil Energy down to $720 million, including $140 million in prior year balances from the IIJA. This would be a 16.8% cut from fiscal year 2025 levels. It includes especially deep cuts to methane mitigation technologies and to natural gas decarbonization and hydrogen technologies.

"Awards like these are a critical component of our incubator program for future missions, which combines government leadership with commercial innovation to make what is impossible today rapidly implementable in the future," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in the statement.

A Congressional bill restores funding for most NASA space science missions, but there is no money for returning samples already collected on the red planet.

NASA lost contact with the MAVEN probe in Mars orbit, and teams are working to reestablish communications after an unexpected anomaly.

Last year President Trump pitched a severe chop to NASA’s proposed annual budget for 2026, but the House and Senate on Monday released an appropriations bill that would mostly ignore those cuts. The minibus bill put forth by both congressional bodies’ appropriation committees includes NASA as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation,

A new NASA spacecraft called Pandora is awaiting launch ahead of its journey to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, and