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Thank you for being a reader for so long. We're expanding our coverage, and today's a first for us: a whole edition built around one theme, Space, instead of our usual mix.

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President Trump announces a Space Academy

Trump signed the executive order Friday in front of NASA's astronaut corps at Johnson Space Center and said the new United States Space Academy would be "along with West Point and Annapolis" as one of the nation's service academies. "That's a big deal," he said to the room. "We're gonna have an academy for what the people in this room love the most."

What the order creates and what it does not yet

The order does not erect a campus; it starts a process.

At this point, a 120-day report on how the new academy ought to function, led by a presidential commission from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, joined by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and OMB Director Russ Vought, has yet to emerge.

No site has yet been selected, but Trump said Texas Senator Ted Cruz is already arguing vigorously for his state. He said the model is similar to West Point or the Naval Academy, a small selective school for officers, except this one puts graduates into Space Force, NASA and the civilian space industry instead of Army or Navy.

What's still shaky

The Artemis program itself has not had a smooth stretch in recent times. In May, an unmanned Blue Origin rocket exploded on the Cape Canaveral launchpad, damaging the site and raising genuine doubts about mission readiness.

As a result, NASA downgraded the goal for Artemis III in February, from actual lunar landing to instead preparing orbital docking exercises with lander prototypes built by Blue Origin and SpaceX, a drill instead of the moon landing originally promised.

Crew assignments for that mission were revealed in June, with the flight planned for next year. The Space Academy is being built for a program whose own next big mission is still finding its footing.

Space startups raised $11.3 billion across 244 deals through June, already surpassing the $10.1 billion raised across 433 deals in all of 2025, according to PitchBook's 2026 Vertical Snapshot. But the number that matters more is deal count going down while dollars go up: fewer companies are capturing far larger checks.

The median round more than doubled to $14.5 million from $7 million, with late-stage deals now taking 87.4% of total capital. Seed funding fell to just 1.5%, the lowest share on record.

Most of the money concentrated in capital-intensive categories: launch companies pulled in $3 billion, satellites $2.8 billion, infrastructure $1.2 billion, all companies past technical validation and into manufacturing.

Space tech is increasingly treated as an industrial scale-up market rather than an early-stage technology bet, says PitchBook's Ali Javaheri. That's a strong signal for companies with contracts and production capacity already in place. It leaves a real question hanging over everyone else: with seed funding this thin, is the sector still creating enough new companies to fill the pipeline five years out?

Nasa telescope will hunt for new worlds and try to uncover the secrets of the universe

Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, often called the "mother of the Hubble Space Telescope," the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see at least 100 times more sky than Hubble, potentially capturing light from a billion galaxies over its lifetime.

It'll also be able to block out starlight to directly image exoplanets and the disks planets form in, build a statistical census of planetary systems across the galaxy, and help resolve major open questions in dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.

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