Soyuz 5 Debuts, NASA Budget Fights Back

The last week of April packed in enough space news to make your head spin—a Russian rocket debut, a bipartisan budget brawl on Capitol Hill, corrosion eating into modules that haven't even launched yet, and China quietly opening its space station to its first foreign astronaut. None of these stories exist in isolation, and together they sketch something more interesting than any single headline.

Let's start with the one that Scott Manley, in his May 2nd deep-space roundup, flagged as "a special one."

The Rocket Russia Needed

On April 30th, Russia launched the Soyuz 5—which, Manley is careful to note, "is in no way related to the previous Soyuz by any design." The name is basically marketing. What it actually is, functionally and historically, is a replacement for the Zenit: the Ukrainian-built, Russian-engined launch vehicle that Elon Musk once reportedly called the best rocket in the world before Falcon came along.

That collaboration ended with the war. Russia has spent years without a vehicle capable of matching Zenit's performance envelope. The Soyuz 5 is the answer—two stages, kerosene-oxygen propellant, 18 tonnes to low Earth orbit, powered by the new RD-171MV engine (essentially the RD-171 with non-Russian components swapped out). It can be topped with a Block DM or Fregat upper stage for geostationary missions.

The April 30th flight was intentionally suborbital. A payload simulator rode along, the upper stage was fired to depletion in a deliberate dogleg trajectory, and everything ended in the Pacific. By all accounts, it worked.

The technical lineage here is genuinely interesting. The rocket reuses the same launch infrastructure at Baikonur that the old Zenit occupied, and the tank geometry borrows from the Proton. It's a vehicle assembled from surviving institutional knowledge—a workaround built from what Russia still had, after losing the partnership that made Zenit possible in the first place. Whether it becomes commercially significant or remains a domestic workhorse is a question that this single suborbital test doesn't answer.

NASA's Budget: The Hill vs. The White House

The other major thread running through this week's news is the NASA budget fight, and it's more textured than most coverage suggests.

Here's the setup: after Artemis II returned, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed cutting NASA's funding significantly. Administrator Jared Isaacman has since been on a tour of congressional appropriations committees, and the reception has been notably bipartisan. Both the House and Senate appear inclined to reverse much of the proposed reduction—at minimum, to hold NASA's budget flat, which still represents a real-dollar cut given inflation.

Isaacman's position is a study in careful navigation. Manley describes him as "walking a fine line where he's sort of saying, well, more NASA funding would be nice, but I'm not criticizing the White House budget." That's a diplomatically coherent position for someone who needs to maintain relationships with both the administration that appointed him and the legislators who control appropriations. It is not, however, a position that makes for easy interpretation.

The cuts most likely to be reversed, based on committee signals: the science budget reductions, and eliminations targeting NASA's education office. What that reversal actually looks like in dollar terms is still unresolved.

But the more quietly alarming thing that surfaced in these hearings wasn't the budget numbers—it was this: Isaacman disclosed that the two habitable modules already delivered for the Lunar Gateway were both corroded. "There's only two habitable volumes which were delivered," he said, "and both were corroded, and that's unfortunate."

Those modules—the European lab and the HALO habitation module—were built by Thales Alenia Space, the same manufacturer building pressurized modules for the Cygnus spacecraft and for Axiom Space's planned private station. The corrosion, reportedly, is showing up across the board. The cause hasn't been publicly identified, and the implications for Axiom's commercial station are an open question that nobody seems to have a clean answer to yet.

This detail almost got swallowed by the broader budget discussion. It probably deserves more attention than it's getting.

China, Pakistan, and the First Foreign Visitor to Tiangong

Alongside the launch of Pakistan's PRSC-03 remote sensing satellite on a Long March 6, China and Pakistan jointly announced that two Pakistani astronaut candidates—Muhammad Zishan and Ali Quamald—have been selected for training in China. One will fly as a payload specialist, becoming the first non-Chinese astronaut to visit Tiangong.

This is a meaningful symbolic threshold for the Chinese space station program, which has operated as an exclusively national enterprise since it began. It also fits a broader pattern: China has been methodically building space partnerships across the Global South, and Pakistan has been one of the most consistent collaborators—satellites, launch services, now crewed spaceflight training.

The timing matters too. The ISS is aging. Its operational life has a defined endpoint. If Tiangong positions itself as a destination for international partners who lack ISS access—whether by geography, politics, or budget—this is how that positioning begins. Not with a grand announcement, but with two astronaut candidates traveling to China for training.

The Rest of the Board

A few other items from this packed week worth noting:

Gilmore Space concluded its investigation of the Aerys rocket's failed maiden flight—Australia's first attempted orbital launch. The failure traced to the oxidizer pump system: one hydrogen peroxide pump failed nine seconds after ignition, another failed seventeen seconds later, and with two of three engines out, thrust-to-weight dropped below one. The rocket essentially landed itself. Gilmore identified electrical and thermal faults as the underlying causes and says it intends to refly. The hybrid engine design—oxidizer injected into solid propellant on the chamber walls—likely prevented a catastrophic explosion, which is worth acknowledging.

The old Soyuz launch pad at Kourou, French Guiana, has been demolished. Maya Space, which is taking over the facility for a new methane-fueled semi-reusable rocket, used explosives on the service tower. The Soyuz operated from Kourou for 26 commercial launches before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine ended the arrangement. The demolition is as clean a symbol as you'll find of how completely that cooperation has been severed.

Sunita Williams, who logged roughly 600 days in space across her career and 62 hours of spacewalks, has retired from NASA and joined commercial station startup Vast as an astronaut adviser. The flow of experience from NASA's astronaut corps into the commercial sector has become routine enough that it barely registers—but the accumulation of that institutional knowledge in private hands is a structural shift in the industry that's still playing out.

Japan's MMX spacecraft—the Martian Moons eXploration mission—is now at Tanegashima ahead of an H3 launch later this year. The mission targets Phobos specifically, with the goal of collecting surface samples and returning them to Earth around 2029. The scientific stakes are real: Phobos's origin is genuinely contested. Whether it's a captured asteroid or ejecta from a Mars impact has implications for understanding the early solar system. A sample return could resolve that, or complicate it further.

And Starship's next flight has a NET date: May 12th. That's the one a lot of people are watching, for obvious reasons.

The week's news, taken together, isn't really about any single launch or any single policy fight. It's about a half-dozen parallel programs, in half a dozen countries, all making incremental progress—or running into incremental problems—simultaneously. The corrosion in the Gateway modules and the oxidizer pump failures in Australia and the bipartisan budget resistance in Washington are all, in their own way, the same story: building things that work in space is hard, the institutional structures around that effort are under pressure, and the map of who's doing it and with whom is being redrawn in real time.

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Nadia Marchetti is Buzzrag's unexplained phenomena and space correspondent. Former astrophysics PhD candidate, current asker of inconvenient questions.