State Department officials are moving out on implementing President Obama’s new National Space Policy (NSP) in the context of international cooperation and challenges in the space arena according to Frank Rose, deputy assistant secretary of State for verification, compliance and implementation.

Speaking at the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies’ National Space Forum in Arlington, VA yesterday, Mr. Rose identified four areas where the United States is seeking expanded cooperation in implementing the new policy: orbital debris mitigation, shared space situational awareness, improved information sharing for collision avoidance, and transparency and confidence building measures (TCBMs). The forum is conducted under “Chatham House” rules where remarks are on a non-attribution basis, but Mr. Rose’s speech is available via the State Department’s website.

Regarding TCBMs, Mr. Rose said that the United States has been “actively consulting” with Europe over the past 18 months to determine if we can sign on to the draft European Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities, and hope to make a decision in the coming months. Calling it a “comprehensive set of multilateral TCBMs,” he said the United States was determining its “implications for our national security and foreign policy interests.”

Quoting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent comments at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Rose noted that although she did not specifically mention space, her vision for a “new global architecture that could help nations come together as partners to solve shared problems” would help deal with the space program challenges he listed. “Partnership implies shared responsibility…. We have made clear in presenting our space policy to other nations that solving the problems of orbital congestion, situational awareness, collision avoidance, and responsible and peaceful behavior in space are the responsibilities of all who are engaged in space activities….”

The Secure World Foundation has just released a concise fact sheet on Iran’s space program. Authored by SWF’s Tiffany Chow, it is a very useful factual snapshot of what Iran’s space program has accomplished to date and plans that were recently announced by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A new report sponsored by the Secure World Foundation (SWF) and published by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute provides an interesting comparison of the formation and operation of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and today’s need for multinational Space Situational Awareness (SSA).

The similarities and differences between the motivation behind NORAD at the beginning of the missile age and for SSA in this maturing space age were drawn from interviews with U.S. and Canadian military pesonnel who served in NORAD as well as a literature search. The report offers the following insights:

“Although the study found many areas of commonality, there are three critical differences between the NORAD experience and SSA data sharing which should also be kept in mind. The first, and most significant, is that the rationale behind the formation of NORAD was the specter of nuclear war, as powerful a driving force as any in the history of humanity. No motivation of that magnitude is currently foreseen for SSA. The second major difference is that NORAD involved cooperation between two States that had a lengthy (albeit not always peaceful) history. Unlike NORAD, SSA data sharing is very likely to involve a large number of States, some of whom may not have any past experience in sharing data of a security nature or cooperating in general. The third difference is that NORAD is a military organization performing a military mission. Future SSA data sharing and warning efforts are likely to contain a mix of military and non-military organizations and provide data in support of both civil and military missions.”

The report’s author, James C. Bennett, offers a series of observations and conclusions that are captured in the report’s Executive Summary. Of particular note is his conclusion that: “The vast majority of political controversy and tension is likely to arise over decisions based on analyzed data; thus, data sharing agreements should focus on data collection and analysis and leave decision making and responses to the individual participating States.”

Thirty-five years ago today, an American Apollo capsule docked with a Soviet Soyuz capsule in Earth orbit. The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) was a milestone in international cooperation in space — the union of the two Cold War superpowers, who used the space program as a symbol of their technological prowess.

Quite a few space enthusiasts paint Apollo-Soyuz as a case study of how the space program can unite disparate countries and contribute to world peace, but it really is the other way around. The era of detente between the United States and Soviet Union in the early 1970s allowed ASTP to happen. It is the fundamental relationship between countries that permits — or prevents — space cooperation as evidenced by the fate of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation after ASTP, which all but ended in 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The United States strongly objected to the Soviet invasion. (How times have changed!) One of the casualities was U.S. participation in the Moscow Olympic Games; another was U.S.-Soviet space cooperation. The United States turned a cold shoulder to the Soviets and the “space race” mentality returned full force. By 1984, NASA convinced President Ronald Reagan that the United States and its traditional international partners should build a space station to assure U.S leadership in space versus the Soviets. The Soviets named their third generation space station, launched in 1986, Mir — “Peace.” We named ours “Freedom.”

It is indeed ironic that Freedom evolved into a new union of U.S.-Russian space capabilities after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The name “Freedom” was dropped (for a number of reasons) and the “International Space Station” (ISS) emerged with Russia added as additional partner. Today, the United States is about to embark on an era of total reliance on Russia’s Soyuz to take its astronauts to and from ISS.

That’s an interesting tale still in progress. Meanwhile, several histories of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation — which predated ASTP, but at a fairly low level — are available, including an excellent book by Linda and Edward Ezell about ASTP published by NASA in 1978: The Partnership — a History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, NASA SP-4209.

The BBC reports that Japanese scientists have found particles inside the sample return capsule of the Hayabusa spacecraft that completed its seven-year round trip journey to asteroid Itokawa last month. They do not know for certain yet, however, whether they are from the asteroid or Earth.

Japanese scientists are in the process of opening the sample return capsule from the Hayabusa asteroid mission that completed its journey on June 13. The capsule was flown from its landing site in Australia to Japan and is now at a special curation facility at the Sagamihara Campus. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that it began opening the capsule today and the process will take one week.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government is considering a follow-on mission dubbed Hayabusa-2 that would visit a different kind of asteroid. Hayabusa landed on an “S-Type” asteroid while the new mission would visit a “C-Type” asteroid designated 1999 JU3. (For more on the different types of asteroids, visit The Planetary Society’s website.) The proposed Hayabusa-2 would include an impactor.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting with baited breath to see what this Hayabusa returned. The spacecraft experienced a number of technical problems, one of which was an apparent failure of the mechanism that was intended to grab the sample. Scientists are hoping that at least some dust from the spacecraft’s landing managed to find its way into the return capsule. If not, the mission at a minimum was a great success in terms of troubleshooting mission-threatening problems and sending a spacecraft on a seven-year roundtrip journey with a pinpoint landing in the Australian outback.

Officials from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, will meet with European Commission members on July 7 to discuss options for developing a joint anti-asteroid defense program, RIA Novosti reported today. The initiative comes after Anatoly Perminov, head of the agency, expressed interest to lead an international effort to deal with the risk of a near-Earth object (NEO) collision last December.

According to the article the meeting will include the input of scientists and engineers from Roscosmos, as well as experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences and other institutions. Scientists from the Astronomy Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences have reportedly detected a total of 6,690 NEOs as of April, the majority of which measure between 100 and 1,000 meters in diameter. This is part of what Perminov described as growing international awareness on the threat of NEOs. He was quoted as saying that “in recent years, the attention of scientists, technicians, politicians and the military has become increasingly focused on the asteroid and comet hazard, namely the threat of the Earth’s collision with large space bodies.”

A recent report by the U.S. National Research Council, Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, released last January stressed the need to increase research in identifying and mapping NEOs that could pose a potential threat in order to devise effective mitigation strategies. The main finding of the report is that NASA would be unable to meet the deadline of 2020 to map 90% of NEOs 140 meters or more in diameter as Congress mandated in 2005, because of lack of funding.

In response to the NRC report, the proposed FY2011 NASA budget request substantially increases funding for the Near Earth Object Observations (NEOO) program under the Science Mission Directorate, from approximately $4 million to $16 million. The increase will be used to improve use of current and planned observatory missions, including the WISE spacecraft and the ground-based PAN-STARRS and Arecibo facilities. The funding will “significantly” increase NASA’s efforts “to find and characterize asteroids and comets … which may be destinations and resources for our exploration of the solar system, or could become potential impact hazards to the Earth,” according to the budget document.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) reports that it “completed the recovery of the Hayabusa capsule at 4:08 pm on June 14, 2010 (JST). The capsule is deemed intact at the moment.” The recovery time was 3:08 am this morning EDT. Check back for more news as it becomes available.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) asteroid sample return spacecraft, Hayabusa, presumably has landed in Australia as planned. The BBC reports that the reentry spacecraft hit the top of the atmosphere at 13:50 GMT (9:50 am EDT), but it would take recovery teams several hours to pinpoint the landing site and determine if it landed intact. No information about the actual landing has yet appeared on JAXA’s website. A video of the reentry is on UStream. The fireball begins to emerge at 2:58 into the video. Beautiful!

UPDATE: See truly amazing video from a NASA DC-8 of the reentry on YouTube. You can see the mother spacecraft burning up as a fireball while the return capsule continues on its descent.

ORIGINAL STORY: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) reports that it has confirmed the landing site of the asteroid sample return capsule from the spacecraft Hayabusa (also known as Muses-C). The capsule landed in the Woomera Prohibited Area in Australia. The mother spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere as planned; only the capsule was designed to survive reentry. The BBC adds that the capsule will not be approached until daylight local time and “safety and sterilisation protocols will not permit the capsule’s evacuation and transfer to Japan for several days.”

Scientists are wondering what samples are in the capsule. The Hayabusa mission survived a number of technical challenges during its 7 year mission, one of which reportedly was that the mechanism that was intended to grab a sample from the surface of the asteroid after the spacecraft landed malfunctioned. The BBC reports that Japanese scientists remain optimistic that, at a minimum, enough dust would have been generated by the spacecraft’s landing that some of it would have made its way into the chamber of the return capsule.