#NASA

#NASA

An ailing astronaut returned to Earth with three others on Thursday, ending their space station mission more than a month early in NASA's first medical evacuation. SpaceX guided the capsule to a middle-of-the-night splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego, less than 11 hours after the astronauts exited the International Space Station. Their first stop was a hospital for an overnight stay.

erring on the side of caution for the crew member,

The move could raise tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX, but there's more than money at stakethe future of space exploration hangs in the balance, too. SpaceX is integral to numerous critical missions with both NASA and the Pentagon, including ferrying crew and cargo to the International Space Station, placing satellites in orbit and being key to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2028.

In a statement, NASA revealed that it agreed to modify Boeing's existing 2014 Commercial Crew contract to have Starliner carry cargo only for its first operational flight, Starliner-1, which is tentatively scheduled for "no earlier than April 2026." "Following Starliner certification, and a successful Starliner-1 mission, Starliner will fly up to three crew rotations to the International Space Station," NASA's statement reads.

OPINION - Space has gone from frontier to front line. But despite this increased urgency and to remain first in flight, the Trump administration recently the Office of Space Commerce's budget. Additionally, NASA remains without a permanent leader and is struggling to select a new lunar lander for its Artemis missions. It's a dangerous place to be as America's adversaries are investing heavily in everything from spy satellites to landing on the Moon. Now is the time for the United States to prioritize investment in innovation and security.

Long before Congress failed to pass a funding bill, the Trump administration essentially started shutting down the government bit by bit, Gorman says. At NASA, entire offices have been shuttered, including her own at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She had been using data science to predict the cost of future NASA missions. Due to cuts proposed in Trump's budget request, she was reassigned to a new position working on a lunar communications project.