NASA Seeks 'Good Deals' in International Space Partnerships, Ars Technica Reports

NASA's approach to foreign partnerships now focuses on "good deals only," Ars Technica reported on 7 October 2026. Administrator Jared Isaacman said international partners must be ready to make "meaningful contributions," with greater urgency than before. He said partners should offer something NASA or US companies are not already doing and deliver it when NASA needs it.

NASA canceled the Lunar Gateway, a space station that was to be assembled in orbit around the Moon, according to the report. It also canceled the Mars Sample Return mission after that mission's budget grew beyond $10 billion. Ars Technica reported that both projects had involved extensive cooperation with international partners, with NASA leading both.

The report described friction between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which it said is struggling to find a place in NASA's Moon Base program after Gateway's cancellation. Isaacman rejected an ESA proposal from earlier in 2026 to develop a European cargo lander to carry supplies for the Moon Base. NASA officials expect US-built landers to fill that role sooner, the report said.

Isaacman cited Japan's commitment to provide a pressurized rover for astronauts on the Moon and Italy's agreement to build what will likely be the first habitat for the Moon Base, according to Ars Technica. The report also pointed to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission as another example of a "good deal".

LISA is planned as the world's first space-based observatory for detecting and studying gravitational waves, the report said. ESA will lead the mission, with significant contributions from the United States, and launch is scheduled for around 2035. Three spacecraft will fly in a triangle formation in heliocentric orbit (orbiting the Sun), positioned nearly 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) apart. Each spacecraft will carry two free-floating gold-platinum cubes inside an internal Faraday cage, a shield that blocks electric fields.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by cataclysmic events in the distant cosmos, Ars Technica reported. Astronomers made the first detection with a ground-based observatory in 2015 and have since used gravitational waves to reveal collisions of black holes and neutron stars in faraway galaxies. The report said LISA will detect low-frequency gravitational waves by spreading its detectors over greater distances.