【AI前沿】"I'll buy 10 of those"—NASA science chief yearns for mass-produced satellites

Closing the gap“I’ll buy 10 of those”—NASA science chief yearns for mass-produced satellites“How in the hell do I get more science into space? That is my goal.”Stephen Clark–May 19, 2026 4:43 pm|22Saturn’s moon Enceladus peeks over the limb of Dione during a partial occultation, as seen by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on September 13, 2008.Credit:

      NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteText
    settingsStory textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth*StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers onlyLearn moreMinimize to navThere are more opportunities to access space than ever, thanks to a bevy of commercial rockets, some with reusable boosters, led by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. So why is NASA launching fewer telescopes and planetary science missions than it did a quarter-century ago?The answer is complex. It is not necessarily the money. The space agency’s science budget this year is $7.25 billion, roughly the same as it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. This is despite attempts by the Trump administration to drastically reduce NASA science funding.In the early months of his tenure, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s focus has been on human spaceflight and the Moon. This isn’t terribly surprising given NASA’swildly successful Artemis II missioncarrying four astronauts around the Moon last month. Since taking office in December, Isaacman has announced an overhaul of the Artemis program,canceling a space stationto be built in orbit around the Moon in favor of construction of a base on the lunar surface.On the robotic front, Isaacman is pushing for NASA to launch afirst-of-its-kind nuclear-powered spacecraftin 2028 to deliver a trio of drone rotorcraft to explore Mars. Isaacman has not said as much about concrete changes to NASA’s science program. He has defended the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to NASA’s science budget—as would be expected of him as a Trump political appointee—but the budget proposals come from the White House, not from NASA headquarters.“Mr. Isaacman is very keen on us doing things quicker and for less,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate. “More shots on goal is one of his favorite phrases. And I think, for us, it’s looking at the right-sized mission for the problem. Not everything has to be $1 billion or more. There are ways you can do fantastic science. His challenge is he wants 10 $100 million missions to be flying.”How to get there?A future with numerous robotic probes spread throughout the Solar System sounds thrilling to space scientists and space enthusiasts, but you can’t get there with flat budgets and billion-dollar missions that take a decade to get off the ground. Many of NASA’s robotic science missions use purpose-built satellites and instruments, usually manufactured by large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, university labs, or NASA itself. Unlike SpaceX’s hangars full of reusable rockets, there’s no building with cameras, spectrometers, telescopes, and spacecraft buses—the core chassis of a satellite platform—lying around waiting to launch.“Instead of having a bespoke bus that does absolutely everything, and makes the tea and brings you toast, what can you do with an off-the-shelf bus?” Fox told Ars. “And maybe you have to change a few things. Maybe you fly fewer instruments, but maybe you fly three [spacecraft] together. How do we really pick up the pace? Because it is difficult when you have long gaps between the missions. It’s certainly not what anyone wants to see.”One way to make this future real is with mass-produced, high-power satellites. Small CubeSats, just the size of a suitcase, are great for missions close to home, but they won’t cut it for missions to more distant destinations, such as another planet or a unique orbit far from Earth. NASA is making use of other ways to collect scientific data in space, such as placing instruments on the International Space Station or on commercial communications satellites.But those solutions won’t work if you want to travel to another world. Sometimes it just costs a lot of money to do the near-impossible.“For $100 million, you can’t buy a bus from somewhere and put four instruments on it and send it toflight to Enceladus to look under the icethere,” Fox said. “No, that’s a big, ambitious mission. We want to fly an interstellar-type probe. As theVoyagers are getting older, we want to study interstellar space. These things are hard, and they’re tough, and it will take a lot of effort to do that. We also talked about actually flying a mission to Uranus.”But what about spacecraft flying on more well-trodden paths to the Moon, Mars, Venus, or the asteroid belt? “What can we do with these commercial off-the-shelf buses? I would love to walk in and say, ‘I’ll buy 10 of those,’” Fox said.NASA islooking at “block buys” for the next series of commercial missionsto the Moon. These privately owned landers and orbiters, part of the Commercial Lunar Pa