L ast year Christopher Reynolds started to worry that his space telescope was going to be killed. The mission had started taking shape nine years earlier, a billion-dollar orbiting observatory that would look back in time into the early universe to study the first black holes , the formation of galaxies, and more. Eight teams of researchers pitched NASA their ideas; Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was part of a group that wanted to deploy a new technology: x-ray mirrors made of single-crystal silicon. It sounded promising enough that in October 2024 Reynolds’s group got a $5-million grant from the agency to refine the idea—the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite, or AXIS. The scientists teamed up with spacecraft builders at the nasa Goddard Space Flight Center. “Everything seemed to be going pretty well,” Reynolds says.…