"We are faced with another space race," Jared Isaacman, NASA's new administrator, told NBC News after he was sworn in on Thursday.

Fomalhaut lies about 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, aka the Southern Fish, and is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. It is surrounded by several belts of dust and debris, material left over from the planet-building process, similar to our solar system’s Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

A major step toward launch day is complete as NASA's Artemis II astronauts ran through a countdown demonstration test.

NASA’s veteran Mars orbiter MAVEN has slipped into an unnerving quiet, cutting off a decade of continuous atmospheric monitoring from high above the red planet. Engineers are now racing to understand why the spacecraft stopped talking to Earth and how a mission designed to study how Mars lost its air has itself been thrown into

Jared Isaacman has poured fuel on the new space race between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, saying NASA will pick whichever lunar lander is ready first.

On July 4, NASA's GOES-18 satellite captured the Dragon Bravo fire in Arizona's Grand Canyon National Park which started with a lightning strike and quickly became a roaring wildfire. The fire destroyed over 70 historic buildings, including the iconic Grand Canyon Lodge.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been serving as the interim NASA administrator, congratulated Isaacman, Reuters reported he wrote on X, wishing the new administrator, "success as he begins his tenure and leads NASA as we go back to the Moon in 2028 and beat China."

Trump withdrew Isaacman's nomination in May, citing the billionaire's donations to Democrats and ties to Elon Musk. He was renominated last month and confirmed by a 67-30 Senate vote on Wednesday.

Isaacman was first nominated for the role year ago, but President Trump withdrew his nomination months later. Then Trump renominated Isaacman last month.

NASA is speeding up communications in space with experiments aboard the International Space Station, Orion spacecraft and more. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The U.S. Senate voted today (Dec. 17) 67-30 to confirm billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman as the new NASA administrator, ending more than a year of uncertainty as the space agency has followed marching orders from temporary chiefs

With NASA’s operations under existential threat from the Trump administration, maybe it’s not surprising that the agency will be taking a much needed moment to zone out and gaze into a void or two — albeit in a billion-light-year stare that’ll plumb the mysteries of the abyss.