NASA is advancing American leadership in space by taking the next step toward a future where commercial space stations lead the way in low Earth orbit. On Friday, the agency released its final Request for Proposals inviting industry to submit plans for the next generation of commercial space stations.
“In alignment with the President’s National Space Policy, NASA is committed to maintaining a sustained American presence in low Earth orbit long after the International Space Station retires,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We will continue to need a place to conduct research, develop technologies, train crews, and prepare for missions to the Moon and Mars. Commercial space stations may provide that capability while creating new opportunities for American industry and allowing NASA to concentrate more of our resources on the near-impossible missions ahead.”
Building on the agency’s Ignition event earlier this year, NASA regularly has engaged with private industry to shape the agency’s future direction in low Earth orbit. This included publishing two Requests for Information in March to gather industry’s perspective on low Earth orbit destinations and transportation. The agency also published a draft Request for Proposals in July, followed by an industry day and one-on-one meetings that allowed interested companies to review and comment on the planned acquisition approach.
“We’ve made it clear that NASA will never give up its presence in low Earth orbit,” said Isaacman. “Since Ignition, we have spent a lot of time listening to industry and working through what it will take to make this transition successful. The opportunity is significant, but the economics ultimately have to work. We want to see credible plans, strong technical execution, and companies prepared to invest in destinations that can serve NASA while developing additional customers and markets of their own.”
Proposals are due Tuesday, Dec. 8, with contract awards expected in spring 2027.
Under the solicitation, NASA outlines requirements for companies interested in designing, building, testing, certifying, and operating commercial low Earth orbit destinations capable of providing end-to-end destination and transportation services for human spaceflight use.
NASA intends to award firm-fixed-price, multi-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts supporting development, certification, and services for continued low Earth orbit research and exploration. This will allow NASA to select two or more contractors through early development, followed by a competitive task order for final design, test, and evaluation, as well as certification and services from one or more contractors.
Learn more about NASA’s missions on the agency’s website:
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft is seen moments before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California in this Oct. 8, 2026, photograph. Aboard were NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 members NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. The four spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
As it maps the sky, NASA’s SPHEREx telescope is finding thousands of brown dwarfs hiding in the dark. A selection is shown in this collage of observations, listed by spectral type, distance, and temperature in degrees Kelvin.
Zafar Rustamkulov/NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) space telescope is shedding light on brown dwarfs, celestial objects that blur the line between stars and exoplanets. New findings published in The Astrophysical Journal show that these dark and cloudy worlds have chemically rich atmospheres not unlike the giant planets in our own solar system.
First discovered in the 1990s, brown dwarfs form from collapsing clouds of gas, like stars do, but they aren’t hefty enough to sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores. These dimly glowing balls of warm gas also share characteristics with Jupiter and Saturn. In contrast to most planets, however, brown dwarfs drift in darkness, ungoverned by a host star and heated entirely from within.
“They’re kind of goth,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, lead author of the new study and a scientist at IPAC, Caltech’s science and data center in Pasadena, California. “Unlike exoplanets, free-floating brown dwarfs are completely independent celestial objects that will fade into eternity alone. We’re still learning how complex they are.”
Untold numbers of brown dwarfs roam the cosmos, like the one in this artist’s concept. But only a few dozen have been studied in detail with space-based telescopes. With the help of NASA’s SPHEREx, scientists are in the process of analyzing thousands more.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Only a few dozen of these “dark wanderers” have been studied in detail with space-based telescopes. Astronomers want to observe more of them in the wild because much of our understanding of their makeup, storminess, and evolution comes from theoretical models.
Enter NASA’s SPHEREx, an infrared space telescope launched in March 2025 and managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The study authors analyzed SPHEREx observations of 37 nearby brown dwarfs spanning the full brown dwarf temperature range, from about 4,000 to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 to minus 20 degrees Celsius). The telescope measures their brightness in 102 different colors, from the deepest red our eyes can see, to the invisible heat of infrared light, creating a spectrum. These spectra revealed to the study authors chemically rich atmospheres harboring water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane.
“We’re seeing the signatures of these molecules and how they change from object to object across the entire temperature regime,” said study coauthor J. Davy Kirkpatrick, a scientist at Caltech’s IPAC. “Our paper concentrated on just three dozen, but we have thousands more that we are in the process of analyzing. I really want to see what bounds the universe places on the variety of brown dwarfs.”
“From orbit, SPHEREx sees wavelengths of light that are basically impossible to see with telescopes on the ground because water in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them,” Rustamkulov said. “We are picking up light from the deep, red clouds of brown dwarfs all over the sky.”
Sweet spot
Spotting brown dwarfs is something of a side project for SPHEREx. The space telescope takes about 3,600 unique images per day to stitch into maps of the entire sky. Knowing where hundreds of millions of galaxies are distributed across the cosmos will help scientists reconstruct what happened in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang. As it scans the sky, the telescope also is searching for the chemical ingredients of life and finding interstellar ice that could one day seed oceans on distant worlds.
For years, brown dwarfs have been spotted by other observatories, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and retired Spitzer Space Telescope. But thanks to its spectral coverage, SPHEREx is now imaging thousands of them for the first time in a fruitful region of the electromagnetic spectrum that spans deep red and infrared wavelengths of light.
Thanks to its spectral coverage, NASA’s SPHEREx is revealing molecules like methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), and carbon monoxide (CO) in brown dwarf atmospheres. The telescope’s view of three different brown dwarfs appears on the left; the depictions on the right imagine them as Jupiter-like worlds.
Zafar Rustamkulov/International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) et al. Acknowledgments: M. Zamani
At those wavelengths, molecules carve out distinct absorption patterns in the light shining out to space. The patterns change as brown dwarfs grow older and colder. Some of the brown dwarfs observed by SPHEREx are in a dynamic stage of life when their exotic clouds thin out, giving way to methane-rich atmospheres.
“The state-of-the-art models are capturing the general chemical trend, but when it comes to these cloudy transitions, the models are struggling to match the data,” said Rustamkulov. “No two brown dwarfs are alike. Even at the same temperature, their spectra look quite distinct.”
“The findings are a call to action to explore even more of these dark worlds,” said Kirkpatrick. “This journey has turned many of us into accidental meteorologists. We know how hard it is to predict weather on our own planet, and we realize it’s going to be just as challenging to explain the phenomena we see in these bizarre, cold objects.”
More about SPHEREx
The mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the United States and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Jamie Bock, principal investigator, who is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL’s Olivier Doré, the project scientist. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
Webb Measures Distance to Farthest Fast Radio Burst, Suggesting Origin
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) was able to detect the host galaxy of the fast radio burst called FRB 20240304B, whose location is shown by the white cross. They found it is a small dwarf galaxy actively forming stars.
Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Themiya Nanayakkara (USYD); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
First discovered in 2007, fast radio bursts are enigmatic, millisecond-long flashes of radio emission from the distant universe. Their origin remains uncertain, particularly since most are seen once and never again. Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have pinpointed the host galaxy of the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) seen to date. Their finding has implications for what kind of energetic event creates these bursts.
“What makes fast radio bursts interesting is that we don’t know what generates them. We have theories for what objects produce them, but we don’t have conclusive proof,” said Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney, lead author on the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
The MeerTRAP team used the MeerKAT telescope to detect the burst on March 4, 2024, leading to its designation as FRB 20240304B. The radio data from this burst suggested that it was extremely distant, possibly the most distant one seen to date. To confirm that distance, though, astronomers would need to study its host galaxy. Although they knew the location of the FRB very precisely, the world’s largest ground-based telescopes could not see any galaxy at that spot in the sky. As a result, the team turned to the Webb telescope.
Image: FRB 20240304B (NIRCam Image)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) was able to detect the host galaxy of the fast radio burst called FRB 20240304B, whose location is shown by the white cross. They found it is a small dwarf galaxy actively forming stars.
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Themiya Nanayakkara (USYD); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument detected a galaxy in the right location, and its NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument provided a precise measurement of the galaxy’s redshift: 2.148, corresponding to a time just 3 billion years after the big bang. The vast majority of FRBs detected to date occurred billions of years later in cosmic history.
The team discovered that the host galaxy of FRB 20240304B was not typical of other galaxies with FRBs. Most FRB galaxies are massive star-forming galaxies, but the galaxy they found was 1,000 times less massive than they expected.
“We thought it would be a big, nicely formed galaxy with lots of stars, and instead it was a little dwarf galaxy, although it was actively forming stars,” said Caleb.
“The host sticks out in the whole galaxy sample that we have. And it definitely was not what we were expecting,” said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, a co-author on the paper. “This combination of using the MeerTRAP project on the MeerKAT telescope to discover and localize these distant bursts and Webb to study their hosts is very exciting.”
The galaxy existed at the height of “cosmic noon” – a period in the history of the universe when star formation was at its peak. The galaxy’s rate of star formation suggested that the majority of its stars may have formed within just 30 million years.
This has important implications for the origin of fast radio bursts. One theory suggests that FRBs may originate from the merger of two neutron stars. However, the process of orbiting neutron stars gradually approaching closer and closer until they collide is expected to take billions of years. As a result, FRBs would be expected to be associated with older galaxies containing more evolved stellar populations.
A second theory proposes that an FRB can originate from a single, young, highly magnetic neutron star known as a magnetar through a mechanism like starquakes. In that case, once a massive star explodes as a supernova and leaves behind a magnetar, an FRB might occur relatively quickly with no large time delay. As a result, FRBs would also be expected to be found in younger galaxies like the host of FRB 20240304B.
“Our work suggests that it’s very unlikely that this FRB was produced by a merger,” said Caleb.
“Our results further show the amazing capability of Webb where we can push boundaries beyond what was previously possible,” said co-author Themiya Nanayakkara of the University of Sydney, Australia.
In addition to being a record-holder, the new FRB enabled the team to learn more about the billions of light-years of apparently empty space between the burst and Earth.
“A fast radio burst is almost like a cosmic flashlight. It lights up everything along the path. It carries an imprint of everything that it travels through, so you can use it to trace the ‘cosmic web’ – the otherwise invisible matter and structures that it encounters along the way,” said co-author J. Xavier Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The team found the imprint of two cosmic structures on the FRB’s signal – one previously unknown galaxy cluster at a redshift of 0.3 (about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth), and the nearby Virgo Cluster, which is located about 54 million light-years from Earth.
Image: Farthest Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Spectrum
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were able to study the host galaxy of the most distant known fast radio burst (FRB). They confirmed it has a cosmological redshift of 2.148 and that the FRB occurred just 3 billion years after the big bang.
Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI); Science: Manisha Caleb (SIfA)
In the future, the team is excited about the potential to discover more distant FRBs. They estimate that the MeerKAT telescope may be able to detect and localize several FRBs per year at a redshift greater than 1.0, meaning they existed more than halfway back to the start of the universe. As other new radio telescope facilities and instruments come online, that discovery pace may grow. The Webb telescope will be essential for characterizing those distant host galaxies.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Related Images & Videos
FRB 20240304B (NIRCam Image)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) was able to detect the host galaxy of the fast radio burst called FRB 20240304B, whose location is shown by the white cross. They found it is a small dwarf galaxy actively forming stars.
Farthest Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Spectrum
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were able to study the host galaxy of the most distant known fast radio burst (FRB). They confirmed it has a cosmological redshift of 2.148 and that the FRB occurred just 3 billion years after the big bang.
FRB 20240304B (NIRCam Compass Image)
This image of the host galaxy of fast radio burst FRB 20240304B, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.
A satellite image of farmland around Lubbock, Texas, on September 22, 2025, features a patchwork of green and brown agricultural fields and several playa lakes with varying amounts of water.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A satellite image of the same Lubbock region on September 9, 2026, appears parched, with much less green vegetation and mostly dry lakes.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A satellite image of farmland around Lubbock, Texas, on September 22, 2025, features a patchwork of green and brown agricultural fields and several playa lakes with varying amounts of water.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A satellite image of the same Lubbock region on September 9, 2026, appears parched, with much less green vegetation and mostly dry lakes.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
September 22, 2025
September 9, 2026
Fields were parched and brown, and playa lakes mostly dry, in Lubbock County in September 2026 (right) compared to September 2025 (left) in imagery captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 satellite. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.
For many longtime cotton farmers in the Texas High Plains, the 2026 drought sparked flashbacks to catastrophic harvests of the past. Miserably dry seasons forced farmers in America’s largest cotton-producing region to abandon massive portions of their dryland crop, including 72 percent in 2022 and 66 percent in 2011.
But in some ways, farmers felt the drought in 2026 entered new territory. “This is the first year that we’ve had cotton completely die,” said Lacy Cotter-Vardeman, a farmer based in Lubbock County whose family has worked the land there for several generations. “I was just talking to our insurance people, and they said they’d never seen this before,” she said, adding that roughly 90 percent of her dryland cotton was dead.
Satellite images highlight the scale of the problem in Lubbock and adjacent counties. Brown, parched crops and vacant plots dominated the landscape on September 9, 2026, when the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured the image above (right). In contrast, much greener landscapes prevailed on September 22, 2025 (left), when the sensor captured an image of the same area during a more typical year with a relatively healthy harvest.
Rows of spindly, wilted cotton photographed in one of Cotter-Vardeman’s fields in Slaton, Texas, appear stressed and near death on August 14, 2026.
Photo by Lacy Cotter-Vardeman.
Subtler signs of the drought are also visible. With groundwater growing scarce in the High Plains aquifer, many farmers in the region have started irrigating just one-half or one-third of their center-pivot fields, explained Tillery Timmons-Sims, an agricultural conservationist who owns land in Brownfield, Texas, and used to grow cotton. In the imagery, these appear as green semicircles and quarter circles.
Note also the many shallow water features known as playa lakes—sometimes called mud holes, buffalo wallows, and lagoons—scattered throughout the image. Some, like Double Lakes and Mound Lake, are fairly large, but most of the more than 19,300 playa lakes in the Texas High Plains are quite small, less than 30 acres.
Many of these ephemeral lakes were dry in September 2026, unlike the previous year. Playa lakes are critical in this water-stressed region because the clay-lined features, if active, collect rainfall and provide pathways for water to seep underground and recharge the aquifer below, the region’s primary source of irrigation water. However, some 80 percent are so modified by tilling or buried with sediment that they no longer function that way.
Drought remained severe across many parts of the Texas High Plains in October 2026 despite some rain falling in recent weeks. The data depicted in the map are produced by the U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. NASA Earth Observatory map by Lauren Dauphin.
Farmers in this region operate along the eastern margin of the aquifer, which has declined sharply in recent decades. According to U.S. Geological Survey data, the water table across much of Lubbock County has dropped by between 25 and 100 feet since 1950, around when people began drawing large volumes of water from the aquifer to irrigate. Losses have been even more extreme (150 feet or more) in counties to the north, including Parmer, Castro, Swisher, and Briscoe.
The aquifer’s long-term decline, combined with the 2026 drought, left many wells “pumping air” this summer for some of the farmers Timmons-Sims knows. “We simply don’t have groundwater to fall back on anymore,” she said. Many farmers she knows thought that water might run out during the next generation; instead, it’s “happening now,” she said. For Cotter-Vardeman, the problem couldn’t be more tangible. Many of her irrigation wells stopped working in August.
Rains in September and October, aided by a strong El Niño in the Pacific, are bringing needed moisture to the region, but they haven’t been enough, according to analysis from the U.S. Drought Monitor. “It will take about 7 inches of rain over a three-month period to ‘end’ the current drought,” said Jonathan Case, a meteorologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and one of the Drought Monitor’s authors.
The deteriorating aquifer is one of the reasons Timmons-Sims stopped farming in 2007. She now spends most of her time searching for ways to keep farms in business, such as converting irrigated croplands to grasslands to earn water credits, developing alternative energy projects, adopting water-efficient techniques, and working with conservation organizations to plan for the long term.
Through that work, the Sandhills Area Research Association, a conservation organization she helps run, partnered with NASA Acres, a research consortium that connects farmers with NASA science to address agricultural challenges.
In August, a NASA Acres listening tour brought NASA officials to Cotter-Vardeman’s farm in Slaton, a vineyard in Meadow, and parched cotton fields in Kress (below). At each stop, the conversation returned to water: how to preserve the ailing aquifer, and how farmers could manage their land in ways that would help restore playa lakes and return billions of gallons of water to the aquifer.
Farmers and NASA scientists inspect wilted cotton in Kress, Texas, during a NASA Acres listening tour on August 25, 2026.
NASA Acres / Adam Zwerner
The playa lakes around Lubbock were among the first scientific topics researchers studied after Landsat 1 launched in 1972. One early analysis by a Texas Tech geoscientist highlighted the Double Lakes playa (shown above), estimating that monitoring lakes from space would cost just a fraction of what ground surveys would.
More recently, a team of Texas Tech University researchers used a deep learning framework to identify and track changes affecting thousands of playa lakes over three decades. Their results, published in September 2026, showed that since 1995, playa lakes declined significantly in 15 of the 45 counties analyzed, highlighting the water challenges facing farmers like Cotter-Vardeman, a member of NASA Harvest’s Farm Innovation Ambassador Team (FIAT).
In Texas, Timmons-Sims and the FIAT team are working to connect farmers and NASA scientists, making it easier for farmers to use NASA data to decide what and when to plant, how to use cover crops and irrigation, and how to manage sediment and playa lakes. “We’re simply running out of time and water,” Timmons-Sims said. “Farmers need information, innovation, optimization, and solutions—and they need it now.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S.Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Photos by Lacy Cotter-Vardeman and Adam Zwerner. Story by Adam Voiland.
