Russia successfully launched Soyuz TMA-21 last night. It is expected to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) tomorrow, delivering three new crew members to join the three already in orbit.

NASA is delaying the launch of STS-134 (Endeavour) by ten days, from April 19 to April 29. The agency says in a press release today that the slip is required to allow for the launch and docking of a Russian Progress cargo ship.

“The delay removes a scheduling conflict with a Russian Progress cargo supply vehicle scheduled to launch April 27 and arrive at the station April 29,” NASA says.

Endeavour is scheduled to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) to the International Space Station as part of a mission commanded by astronaut Mark Kelly. AMS is a particle physics experiment that scientists hope will detect antimatter. Scientists theorize that the universe began with the Big Bang, at which time equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created, but little antimatter has been detected. AMS is designed to help solve that cosmological mystery.

Kelly is married to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) who is recovering from an assassination attempt on January 8 and many are hoping that she will be well enough to attend the launch. His twin brother, Scott, just returned from a long duration mission on the ISS.

Only one space shuttle launch remains on the schedule after this one; the so-called Launch-on-Need mission or STS-135 (Atlantis). NASA plans to fly it as long as Congress does not make severe cuts to its budget. Congress directed NASA to fly the mission in the 2010 NASA authorization, but no funds were requested for it in the FY2011 budget request, complicating its budget fate. NASA is currently planning to launch STS-135 on June 28, 2011.

The following events may be of interest in the week ahead. For more information, see our calendar on the right menu or click the links below.

During the Week

Yes, it is another week consumed with concern about whether there will be a government shutdown. The current Continuing Resolution (CR) expires on Friday at midnight and Congress has not passed anything to replace it. Some pundits are speculating that despite assertions by many members on both sides of the aisle that they would not pass still another short-term CR, that is exactly what may happen. In this case, it may be a CR for only a few days, however. One scenario has it that the House will pass a CR on Friday, but that clearly does not give the Senate time to act, and thus a few-day CR might be necessary. Difficult to tell how well the two sides are coming together on reaching agreement on budget numbers and policy riders for the “full year” CR.

All of that, of course, concerns FY2011, the fiscal year already underway. This is the time of year when the next year’s budget usually is debated, and Congress is moving forward with consideration of FY2012. The first congressional step in crafting a budget is supposed to be House and Senate passage of budget resolutions that set the top line numbers for federal spending on everything — mandatory programs like social security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as discretionary programs like DOD, NASA and the government agencies with which we are all familiar. Last year, neither the House nor the Senate was able to pass a budget resolution and House Republicans have vowed to pass one this year to demonstrate that they are more fiscally reponsible than Democrats who controlled the House last year. House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan is expected to release his version of the House budget resolution on Tuesday, with comitmtee markup expected on Wednesday. although it is not yet listed on the committee’s website.

As many policy wonks point out, the stormy debate over what to do about FY2011 is really just a warm up for FY2012, where Republicans are expected to demand even deeper cuts, and not just to discretionary programs, but to Medicare and Medicaid, too. Apparently they are still debating how far to go in changing the very popular Social Security program.

Monday, April 4

• Launch of Soyuz TMA-21, 5:18 pm CDT (6:18 pm EDT), watch on NASA TV. Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the EDT launch time.

Tuesday, April 5

• AIA./Marshall Inst/STA meeting on Importance of Missile Defense to U.S. and Global Security, U.S. Capitol Visitors Center Congressional Meeting Room – South, 8:15 – 9:45 am EDT
• Release of National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Decadal Survey for Biological and Physical Sciences in Space, 11:00 am EDT
• COMSTAC STOWG. 11:00 am EDT, virtual

Tuesday-Wednesday, April 5-6

• NRC Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, NRC Keck Center, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington, DC (April 6 is joint with the Space Studies Board). Some sessions of this meeting are closed.

Wednesday-Thursday, April 6-7

• NRC Space Studies Board, NRC Keck Center, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington, DC (April 6 is joint with the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board). Some sessions of this meeting are closed..
• International Space Station and Mars conference, George Washington University, Washington DC

Russia will launch three new crew members to the International Space Station (ISS) at 5:18 pm CDT on Monday (6:18 pm Monday EDT; 6:18 am Tuesday at the launch site in Kazakhstan).

The launch of Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko along with NASA astronaut Ron Garan aboard Soyuz TMA-21 will be aired live on NASA TV. See NASA’s press release for details. The three will join the three ISS crew members already aboard the earth orbiting laboratory — American Catherine (Cady) Coleman, Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, and Italian Paolo Nespoli.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the EDT launch time.

The news over the past several days on what progress is being made in resolving the FY2011 budget impasse has been pretty dismal. Politico, National Journal and The Hill all have been publishing stories that say, in a nutshell, that the House and Senate remain far apart on what to do about the budget and a government shutdown on April 8 seemed highly likely. Tonight, however, National Journal (subscription required) reports that Vice President Joe Biden is saying that the two sides have agreed on the dollar level of cuts, if not where they will come from or what to do about policy riders.

The government is operating on a short-term Continuing Resolution (CR) that expires on April 8. Congress must pass some sort of appropriation to keep the government operating after that. Attention is currently focused on passing a “full-year” CR to fund the remaining six months of FY2011, which ends on September 30.

In essence, the unfolding story is that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate negotiators reached a tentative agreement on budget cuts, but conservative House “Tea Party” Republicans soundly rejected it and were not opposed to a government shutdown, at least for a few days, and would not compromise on their drive to make deep cuts. News reports quoting various Democratic Senate sources saying that agreement was close at hand would be quickly countered by House Republicans saying the opposite. In short, it has been quite chaotic.

Thus, a statement by the Democratic Vice President that the two sides have agreed on $73 billion in cuts from the FY2011 budget request may also fail to stand the test of time, but on a cold and rainy Washington evening, it is encouraging to read nonetheless. Still, the caveats are critically important. No agreement on where the cuts will be made, and no agreement on policy language that some House members want to include, such as defunding National Public Radio or Planned Parenthood. Those two issues alone could be deal breakers.

The House passed its version of a full year CR on February 19, cutting $61 billion from FY2010 spending (including a $601 million cut to NASA). The Senate rejected it, along with a Democratic alternative, leading to the current impasse.

One thing both sides appear to agree on is that there is no deal until there is a whole deal, so keep the champagne corked. At this point, however, any step forward, no matter how small or tentative, must be viewed as good news.

The Senate Appropriations Committee’s Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee hearing on NASA scheduled for today has been postponed to May 5 according to the committee’s website.

As promised, NASA has released the first image of Mercury from a Mercury-orbiting spacecraft. The MESSENGER probe took the snapshot this morning.

NASA will release the first image of Mercury from an orbiting spacecraft tomorrow, and more images on Wednesday at a 2:00 pm EDT press conference. The images are from the MESSENGER spacecraft, the first to enter orbit around that planet, which is closest to the Sun.

MESSENGER attained Mercury orbit on March 17, 2011 after a six and a half year journey that included three fly-bys of the planet (plus two flybys of Venus and one of Earth) to get it into the proper position. The spacecraft already has sent back many images of Mercury, and now that it is in orbit can see previously unseen places. NASA’s Mariner 10 probe was the first to fly past Mercury in 1974-1975.

The Wednesday teleconference will be streamed live at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio. Participants are MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon and mission systems engineer Eric Finnegan.

NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report today warning that a key NASA computer network remains vulnerable to cyber attack almost a year after an earlier IG report identified the weaknesses and NASA vowed to fix them.

The report, “Inadequate Security Practices Expose Key NASA Network to Cyber Attack,” concludes that “six computer servers associated with IT assets that control spacecraft and contain critical data had vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to take control of or render them unavailable.” The report goes on to say that once a hacker got inside the NASA network, “the attacker could use the compromised computers to exploit other weaknesses we identified, a situation that could severely degrade or cripple NASA’s operations.”

This new report notes that it had identified weaknesses in this network in a May 2010 report and “even though the Agency concurred with [our] recommendation it remained unimplemented as of February 2011. Until NASA addresses these critical deficiencies and impoves its IT security practices, the Agency is vulnerable to computer incidents that could have a severe to catastrophic effect on Agency assets, operations and personnel.”

The May 2010 report, “Review of the Information Technology Security of [a NASA Computer Network]”, is not available on the OIG website. Instead, the website to which one is directed provides a summary and states that the report contains data that is not usually released under the Freedom of Information Act. The name of the network in question is referred to in today’s report as “NASA’s Agency-wide mission network.”

Today’s report recommends that NASA “expedite implementation of our May 2010 recommendation to establish an IT security oversight program for NASA’s Agency-wide mission network.” It also recommends that NASA’s Mission Directorates identify and continuously monitor Internet-accessible computers on that network and take prompt action to mitigate identified risks. Lastly it calls on the agency to conduct a NASA-wide IT security risk assessment.

The report states that NASA concurred with its recommendations and the Chief Information Officer and Mission Directorates agreed to complete them by the end of this summer.

The following events may be of interest in the week ahead. For more information, see our calendar on the right menu or click the links below. Times, dates and witnesses for congressional hearings are subject to change. Check the relevant committee’s website for up to date information.

During the Week

Members of the House and Senate return to Washington this week, with negotiations on the FY2011 budget still at the top of their to-do list. The current Continuing Resolution (CR) expires on April 8. Democrats and Republicans both complain about using short-term CRs to fund the government, but reports vary as to how well they are progressing in the negotiations for a “full year” CR to fund the rest of FY2011. “Full year” is a misnomer since even in the best of circumstances, it will fund only six months: April-September. Whatever cuts are made will have to be absorbed over that short time period instead of over a full year. President Obama’s decision to enforce the U.N. no-fly zone resolution will complicate the negotiations not only because it means that the Department of Defense needs more money to execute that additional mission, but members on both sides of the aisle are peeved that the President did not consult with Congress before involving the country in this military action. Meanwhile, many hearings are scheduled on the FY2012 budget request,

Tuesday, March 29

• Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. European Command, 9:30 am EDT, G-50 Dirksen

Tuesday-Wednesday, March 29-30

• National Research Council Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board Committee on Review of NASA Technology Roadmaps
  • Panel on Instruments and Computing, Irvine, CA
  • Panel on Robotics, Communications and Navigation, Washington, DC

Wednesday, March 30

• House Science, Space and Technology Commiittee’s Space and Aeronautics subcommittee Hearing on NASA’s Exploration Program in Transition, 10:00 am EDT, 2318 Rayburn
• Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on the FY2012 Air Force budget request, 10:30 am EDT, 192 Dirksen

Wednesday-Thursday, March 30-31

• American Astronautical Society Goddard Memorial Symposium, Greenbelt Marriott, Greenbelt, MD

Thursday, March 31

• CSIS on Future of the Air Force, 8:00 – 9:30 am EDT, 1800 K Street, NW, Washington DC
• House Appropriations CJS Subcommittee hearing on FY2012 OSTP budget request, 10:00 am EDT, H-309 Capitol
• House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on FY2012 Air Force Budget Request, 10:00 am EDT, H-140 Capitol
• Senate Appropriations CJS Subcommittee hearing on FY2012 NASA budget request, 10:30 am EDT, 192 Dirksen
• USRA and Space Policy Institute on U.S. Export Controls and Space Science, 1:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Grand Hyatt Conference Theater, 1000 H Street, NW, Washington DC

Friday, April 1

• House Appropriations CJS Subcommittee hearing on FY2012 NOAA budget request, 10:00 am EDT, H-309 Capitol
• National Space Club Goddard Dinner, 6:30 – 11:30 pm EDT, Hilton Washington, 1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington DC