Jenn Vaughn succeeds Bill Nye as Planetary Society Chief executive

The Planetary Society’s 2026 Impact Report, released Nov. 13, 2026, announced that Jenn Vaughn became chief executive in 2026 after Bill Nye stepped down.

Nye assumed the positions of chief ambassador and vice chairman of the board in 2026 and still represents the society publicly and in Congress. Vaughn joined the society in 1996 as an editorial assistant and later served as managing editor of The Planetary Report, director of publications and chief operating officer.

The report introduced Together, We Explore, a strategy guiding the organization through 2030. It rests on four goals—to inspire, mobilize, lead and thrive—and six core values: curiosity, humanity, optimism, independence, credibility and effectiveness.

A year in which the White House twice proposed cutting NASA science nearly in half preceded the report. For fiscal 2026, the administration sought a 47% reduction, the largest single-year cuts in NASA’s history, but Congress rejected the plan and funded the agency through H.R. 6938, signed Jan. 23, 2026. Led by Casey Dreier, Jack Kiraly and Ari Koeppel, the society mobilized tens of thousands of supporters who sent hundreds of thousands of messages to Congress.

The fiscal 2027 request proposed cutting NASA to $18.8 billion, its smallest budget since 1961, with a 46% cut to science. The society identified 84 missions at risk, more than 50 marked for cancellation, including New Horizons, Juno and DAVINCI. It also said reduced NASA contributions to the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover would strand the mission and leave the agency an unreliable partner.

On April 20, 2026, more than 130 society advocates from 34 states and Washington, D.C., held 280 meetings with congressional offices to oppose a proposed 46% cut to NASA science and seek $9 billion in funding. The Day of Action helped add four new members to the Planetary Science Caucus, and the society backed bipartisan letters from 103 House members and 22 senators seeking $9 billion for NASA science.

Supporters pushed Congress to pass a continuing resolution early in the year and urged lawmakers to sign the funding letters. More than 160,000 comments opposed a White House proposal to let political appointees override scientific peer review, with more than 95% opposed, and Congress blocked the rule changes through mid-December.

Astronauts flew around the Moon in 2026 for the first time in more than half a century, and the society’s Artemis II coverage drew more than 6 million video views on Instagram and YouTube. April was the organization’s biggest traffic month of the fiscal year, with Artemis II coverage alone drawing more than 174,000 website views. Its eight-episode Artemis podcast series topped 99,000 downloads, and society experts made 37 television appearances during the mission.

Planetary Radio reached nearly 1.4 million listeners in 2026 under host Sarah Al-Ahmed. The show featured astronaut Eileen Collins discussing her documentary Spacewoman and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy previewing the August total solar eclipse. It also marked the Los Angeles Astronomical Society’s centennial star party at Griffith Observatory and streamed a fireside chat with JPL Chief Scientist Jonathan Lunine from JPL Mission Control.

On Space Policy Edition, Chief of Space Policy Casey Dreier spoke with Alex MacDonald, NASA’s former chief economist, and Marcia Smith, founder and editor of SpacePolicyOnline.com. Book Club Edition carried conversations with Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, Hugo Award winner Becky Chambers and NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao. The Planetary Report’s March 2026 issue explored comets and the Kuiper belt and introduced Jenn Vaughn, while its June issue asked what it could take for humans to reach Mars shortly after Artemis II.

The September 2026 issue examined the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the next generation of Mars missions, and the December issue closed with The Year in Pictures and an interview with space artist Don Davis about Voyager 1. Every issue included updates on advocacy, science and technology projects, and member stories.

For the Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse, the first visible from Western Europe since 1999, the society built a multilingual eclipse hub with articles in English, French, German and Spanish. CNN, CNN en Español and USA Today cited its resources, and society staff appeared on ABC News Live and co-hosted the SETI Institute’s eclipse livestream.

Children’s books published with Lerner Publishing reached about 800,000 kids across U.S. libraries through 15 titles, including the February 2026 releases Are We Alone? and The Size of Space by Chief Scientist Bruce Betts. The series also includes Casting Shadows: Solar and Lunar Eclipses and the 12-book Exploring Our Solar System series. Random Space Facts videos featuring Betts surpassed 2.2 million views on Epic, a digital library for children 12 and under, since the partnership began in 2022.

International Observe the Moon Night on Sept. 19, 2026, drew participation from 119 countries and all 50 U.S. states, with 4,162 registrations. The Member Roundtable Tour visited eight U.S. cities and met 180 members in person, giving members a first look at the new five-year strategic vision. The Downlink reached more than 100,000 inboxes every week, and the digital member community hosted 19 live events, including 12 author conversations and seven virtual livestreams.

The society awarded $129,673 in 2026 STEP Grants through an open international call for three planetary science and defense projects. Mike Kretlow of the German Center for Astrophysics received $30,000 to expand CORA, a stellar occultation predictor. Nicholas Moskovitz of Lowell Observatory and Northern Arizona University received $49,593 for a low-cost asteroid polarimeter, and Miguel R. Alarcon of Light Bridges received $50,080 for AsteroiDB, a public platform whose pilot holds more than 11 million measurements.

Members began funding Phase 2 of Dr. Jacob Buffo’s search-for-life project in fall 2026 to support AI tools that could help future spacecraft identify promising life-search sites at Mono Lake and Great Salt Lake. Buffo, of Dartmouth College, previously used a 2023 STEP Grant to lead four expeditions to British Columbia’s hypersaline lakes and collect more than 400 samples. The P-Sampler instrument, built by Honeybee Robotics and contributed by NASA, launched in October aboard JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration mission as the next version of PlanetVac.

In 2026, the society put its teams under a Programs department that manages education and outreach work, science and technology projects, advocacy and space policy, and member engagement, and it renamed Development as Advancement and Finance as Administration. It adopted an AI policy to guide staff in using new technologies thoughtfully and consistently with its core value of credibility. The Heising-Simons Foundation awarded a $500,000 grant for policy and advocacy work.

Casey Dreier and Jack Kiraly received the 2026 Harold Masursky Award from the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences for leading the fight to save NASA science. Dreier and Ari Koeppel analyzed more than 100 NASA science missions across three decades and found that mid-cost missions deliver the best balance of cost, reliability, speed and scientific output.