I did not expect to feature NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers in the Tuesday Telescope so soon, but a recent photo she shared is just sublime. (In case you missed it, we wrote about her photo of lightning from space about a month ago.)

This week Ayers has a time-lapse sequence she captured from the Cupola as the International Space Station soared near Central and South America.

"Soooooo much going on in this picture," Ayers wrote on the social media site X . "You can see Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, with South America off in the distance."

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The Trump administration has confirmed that it is pulling the nomination of private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA.

First reported by Semafor, the decision appears to have been made because Isaacman was not politically loyal enough to the Trump Administration.

"The Administrator of NASA will help lead humanity into space and execute President Trump’s bold mission of planting the American flag on the planet Mars," Liz Huston, a White House Spokesperson, said in a statement released Saturday. "It's essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon."

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Europa and Enceladus are two ocean moons that scientists have concluded have liquid water oceans underneath their outer icy shells. The Europa Clipper mission should reach Europa around April of 2030. If it collects data hinting at the moon’s potential habitability, robotic lander missions could be the only way to confirm if there’s really life in there or not.

To make these lander missions happen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team has been working on a robot that could handle the search for life and already tested it on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. “At this point this is a pretty mature concept,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who led this effort.

Into the unknown

There are only a few things we know for sure about conditions on the surface of Europa, and nearly all of them don’t bode well for lander missions. First, Europa is exposed to very harsh radiation, which is a problem for electronics. The window of visibility—when a potential robotic lander could contact Earth—lasts less than half of the 85 hours it takes for the moon to complete its day-night cycle due to the Europa-Jupiter orbit. So, for more than half the mission, the robot would need to fend for itself, with no human ground teams to get it out of trouble. The lander would also need to run on non-rechargeable batteries, because the vast distance to the Sun would make solar panels prohibitively massive.

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Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin's chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos' space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010 , where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

"I had no thoughts of ever running a space company," Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. "I've done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn't want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO."

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Welcome to Edition 7.46 of the Rocket Report! As I write this, the date is May 29. From a meteorological standpoint, "spring" ends in fewer than three days. Summer lasts from June 1 through August 31. Consider this a public service announcement for launch companies targeting "spring" and "summer" launches for various missions.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Xodiac rocket makes its final flight . Originally built by Masten Space Systems, the suborbital Xodiac rocket had flown 175 successful missions before a flight from Mojave, California, on Wednesday. But now, it will fly no more. "While the vehicle remained within its planned flight envelope, it detected an anomalous condition and commanded a flight termination," said Astrobotic , which acquired Masten a couple of years ago. "This resulted in a rapid descent and caused a loss of the vehicle upon impact with its launch pad."

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A Chinese spacecraft built to collect specimens from an unexplored asteroid and return them to Earth successfully launched Wednesday from a military-run spaceport in the country's mountainous interior.

Liftoff aboard a Long March 3B rocket at 1:31 pm EDT (17:31 UTC) from the Xichang launch base kicked off the second mission in a series of Chinese probes to explore the Solar System. This mission, designated Tianwen-2, follows the Tianwen-1 mission , which became the first Chinese spacecraft to land on Mars in 2021.

Chinese officials confirmed the 2.1-metric ton Tianwen-2 spacecraft unfurled its fan-shaped solar arrays shortly after launch, marking an auspicious start to a decade-long tour of the Solar System.

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I'm incredibly excited, as part of the Ars Live series, to host a conversation with three of the very best space reporters in the business on Thursday, May 29, 2025, at 2:30 pm Eastern about the future of NASA and its deep space exploration ambitions.

Joining me in a virtual panel discussion will be:

• Christian Davenport, of The Washington Post
• Loren Grush, of Bloomberg
• Joey Roulette, of Reuters

The community of professional space reporters is fairly small, and Chris, Loren, and Joey are some of my smartest and fiercest competitors. They all have deep sourcing within the industry and important insights about what is really going on.

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SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world's most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program's two previous launches.

But minutes into the mission, SpaceX's Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company's privately-owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX's next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.

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On Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before a launch attempt of the ninth flight test of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, Elon Musk spoke with Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger to talk about where his space company goes from here.

In recent weeks, Musk has dialed back his focus on politics and said he wants to devote the majority of his time to SpaceX and his other companies. So what does that mean?

The conversation came just ahead of the opening of Starship's launch window, at 6:30 pm CT (23:30 UTC) in South Texas. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

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