NASA’s Nuclear-Powered Mars Mission Carries $2.1 Billion Price Tag as Agency Accelerates Red Planet Strategy

Space Reactor-1 Freedom would pioneer nuclear electric propulsion while delivering a trio of helicopters to Mars, but the estimated cost excludes the separate science mission expected to ride aboard the spacecraft.

WASHINGTON | NASA's ambitious effort to launch the world's first nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars is expected to cost more than $2.1 billion, marking one of the agency's most significant investments in advanced deep-space propulsion as it balances competing priorities that include returning astronauts to the Moon and preparing for eventual human exploration of Mars.

The project—known as Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom—is designed to demonstrate nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) for the first time in space while transporting the SkyFall science mission to the Red Planet.

NASA confirmed this week that the spacecraft itself carries an early estimated cost of approximately $2.1 billion, though agency officials emphasized that figure remains subject to refinement as the acquisition process continues.

Notably, the estimate does not include the cost of the SkyFall scientific payload, which some planetary researchers warn could place additional pressure on NASA's already constrained science budget.

Funding Spread Across Four Fiscal Years

According to budget documents submitted to Congress and reviewed by TELL IT LIKE IT IS News, NASA plans to finance the spacecraft through a combination of exploration funding and previously approved reconciliation legislation.

Current projected funding includes:

• FY 2026: $640 million
• FY 2027: $890 million
• FY 2028: $415 million
• FY 2029: $180 million

NASA officials say the agency is restructuring existing exploration resources rather than requesting major new appropriations for the program.

"We are realigning all the resources within the topline to make sure we can cover the items that were identified," agency officials said during recent budget discussions.

The Dubious Rags to Riches Promise of Trump Accounts

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that so-called Trump accounts, new federal investment and savings accounts for children, “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars” by the time children turn 18. That’s only true if parents or other donors contribute thousands of dollars per child per year, assuming future returns are close to historical stock market averages.

While touting the program, Trump has also repeatedly suggested that children from homes with “essentially no money” could become “very rich” with the Trump accounts. But financial experts say it’s unlikely that parents in low-income households would be able to afford to contribute enough for their children’s accounts to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they reach adulthood. “Think of it, children that are born without money, without any money. Great parents, they can have — everything can be great, but they have no money. They can become very wealthy children at 18,” Trump said on July 6. 

Parents, relatives, friends, employers, state governments, philanthropic organizations, and individuals can contribute to these accounts until a child turns 18, up to a combined annual limit of $5,000 per account.

Not everyone has embraced the program; Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi posted on X on July 6, “It’s safe to say, I would pass on a Trump account.” Thompson said, “Trump University already taught us what happens when his name is on the brochure.”

But experts say those who eschew the accounts for their children could be leaving free money on the table.

As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, the federal government will seed new accounts with $1,000 for children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, who have a valid Social Security number. (Parents can open accounts for older children, but they won’t get the $1,000.) In addition, the first 25 million children under the age of 10 and residing in a ZIP code with a median income of $150,000 or less will receive an additional $250, which was funded by Michael and Susan Dell’s donation of $6.25 billion to these investment accounts.

Even if donors don’t contribute anything, that seed money could grow to several thousand dollars by the time a child reaches adulthood.

'TELL IT LIKE IT IS' Fact-Checkers Challenge Trump's Election Security Claims After White House Document Release

In a July 16 prime-time speech that warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” President Donald Trump cast doubt on the country’s ability to hold “free and fair elections” but offered no evidence that widespread fraud had occurred.

He made one reference to never watching “a stolen election again,” but otherwise suggested, rather than outright claimed, that the 2020 election, which he lost, had been “rigged,” as he has often said and has never backed up.

Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded in 2020 that the election that year “was the most secure in American history,” a line the president mocked in his speech last night.

The White House released a trove of documents that Trump said showed the intelligence agencies had kept election vulnerabilities and foreign interference a secret, but election experts said there was very little new information revealed in the president’s speech.

“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a July 17 press conference. “There was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”

Still, Trump distorted the facts on several issues:

• Trump said the documents he released show that China had acquired “220 million U.S. voter files” starting in the 2020 election cycle, and that this had been kept “secret” by U.S. intelligence officials. But state voter files are mostly publicly available, and an April 2020 intelligence assessment said Chinese officials were analyzing state voter rolls.
• The president said released documents revealed that U.S. election infrastructure is “vulnerable,” “easily compromised” and “people within our government knew that.” But one of the documents Trump cited said the election systems, for several reasons, “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”
• Trump said the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to “foreign interference.” It has been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to influence elections. Trump focused on China; it was a “minority view” in an intelligence assessment that China had acted to undermine Trump’s reelection in 2020.
• The president’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that a foreign country changed votes in a U.S. election, but Trump never explicitly claimed that. An adviser to the president said after the speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”
• Trump claimed that a Department of Homeland Security investigation “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” DHS hasn’t explained its methodology, and experts warn the figure is likely highly inaccurate. Past DHS-derived lists have proven unreliable.
• He cited an alleged instance of fraud from 2020 involving fake voter-registration applications in Michigan. Authorities say no one actually voted improperly as a result of the alleged scam, which stemmed from employees of a voter-registration company trying to defraud their employer and was not a deliberate effort to alter votes.
• The president exaggerated the time it took California to count its votes in its June election and falsely suggested that the long timeline indicates something nefarious occurred.
• Trump said that Congress needed to pass the SAVE America Act, describing its voter ID requirements as “simple.” That’s a matter of opinion. The bill’s ID rules would be stricter than those in most of the 36 states that already have a form of voter ID.

RFK Jr.’s Flawed Claims About Sperm Count and Fertility

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has baselessly tied alleged declines in sperm counts among teenagers to a “fertility crisis” or an “explosion in infertility.”

There is very little data on sperm counts in teenagers, and there’s mixed evidence on whether they have changed over time in adults. Regardless, experts told us there isn’t reason to believe declining sperm counts are causing the falling rate of childbirths in the U.S., which has more plausible social and behavioral explanations.

On at least a dozen occasions since becoming HHS secretary, Kennedy has claimed there has been a dramatic drop in sperm counts, saying it’s evidence of a health crisis. His interest in this topic goes back nearly a decade.

“Male sperm counts, I think, in this country are down 50% for teenage males,” he said on a May 28 episode of his recently launched podcast, after introducing concerns about a “stunning” drop in the rate of childbirths. “I read the other day that teenage males today have less sperm than the average 65-year-old American man.” At a May 11 event at the White House, he discussed statistics on childbirths, while also claiming a “fertility crisis” involving falling sperm counts in teens. “This is an existential crisis for our country,” he said.

Contrary to Kennedy’s statements, there is very little data about sperm counts in teenagers in the scientific literature at all. The studies establishing sperm counts in healthy adolescents have “never been done,” Dolores Lamb, who studies male reproductive biology and urology at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, told us.