U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister KISHIDA Fumio just announced that two Japanese astronauts will join future American missions to the Moon and one will become the first non-American to land on the surface. They also signed an implementing agreement for Japan to provide a pressurized rover for astronauts to use on the Moon.
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy today released a Space Sustainability Strategy that calls for the agency to develop a framework for space sustainability. What came out today was just the first step — a strategy for Earth orbit. Next will be cislunar space and more to come after that. NASA soon will post a job opening for a Director of Space Sustainability to lead the effort.
The last flight of a Delta rocket lifted off today from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, bringing to an end more than 60 years of service. The rocket evolved considerably over those decades and this version, Delta IV Heavy, for many years was the most powerful in the U.S. fleet. Carrying a national security payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, Delta IV Heavy ends its service with a near-perfect record.
Here are links to all the articles published on SpacePolicyOnline.com over the last week, April 1-7, 2024, including our “What’s Happening in Space Policy” for this coming week. Click on each title to read the entire article.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of April 7-13, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
Russia’s Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft returned two professional astronauts — a Russian and an American — and a spaceflight participant from Belarus to Earth today. The trio landed in Kazakhstan just after noon local time (early morning EDT). NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara completed a 6-month mission aboard the International Space Station while the other two were in space for just two weeks.
Ed Dwight will finally get to reach space on Blue Origin’s next flight of New Shepard. Like Wally Funk and the other “Mercury 13” women who thought they were in line to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s, Dwight was the only African American in the training process back then. Like them, he was not selected as white males exclusively became astronauts until 1978. He will fly on NS-25, the first Blue Origin passenger flight in almost two years. The date was not announced.
NASA has chosen three companies to participate in the first phase of developing, building and operating Lunar Terrain Vehicles as part of the Artemis campaign. Eventually one of the three — Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, or Venturi Astrolab — will be chosen to build an LTV that can be used both autonomously and with astronauts.
DOD issued its first Commercial Space Integration Strategy today, emphasizing the growing role it sees for commercial space companies in supporting national security space activities. DOD worked closely with the commercial sector in developing the strategy and ensured it is unclassified in order to be transparent about what it is trying to achieve and to hold itself accountable in coming years. The U.S. Space Force is expected to release its own commercial strategy soon.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wants to establish standards for determining what time it is elsewhere in the solar system. A White House policy issued today starts with the Moon, directing NASA and other government agencies to develop a lunar timing standard it calls Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) by the end of 2026 to support operations on and around the Moon. They also are to work with the international community to make it the international cislunar standard.