Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy says it's time for the agency to focus on the moon and Mars, not the "smorgasbord of priorities," like climate science, the agency has been directing its resources.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has directed the agency to fast-track plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Placing an atomic energy source on the lunar surface is “not science fiction,” experts say, but does pose technical challenges.

South Korea's KASA is just one international space agency that will fly cubesats on the mission; Germany's DLR will also contribute its TACHELES cubesat. While Artemis 2 will send astronauts around the moon, the cubesats will have their own science objectives.

"Our society is built on technologies that are highly susceptible to space weather," said NASA's Heliophysics Division Director Joseph Westlake in the release. "Just as we use meteorology to forecast Earth's weather, space weather forecasts predict the conditions and events in the space environment that can affect Earth and our technologies."

Over half a year into Trump's second term, NASA still doesn't have a leader. The space agency is staring down the barrel of some devastating cuts to its science budget, with the Trump administration betting its future on space exploration alone.

NASA's Artemis 2 mission — the first-ever crewed mission of the Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) — is targeting a liftoff between February and April of 2026. Aboard Orion will be NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Headed for a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, the Psyche spacecraft successfully calibrated its cameras by looking homeward.