Here is our list of space policy related events for the week of July 25-29, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in recess until September 6.

During the Week

Nationally, the big event this week is the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.  Not much is expected in the realm of space policy, although former astronaut Mark Kelly will speak on Wednesday.  He will appear with his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.  They have become leaders in the gun control movement and that is expected to be the focus of their presentation, not the space program (but one never knows).   None of the congressional Democrats with leading roles in space policy are on the speakers list as of today (Sunday), although Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) will be there.  He represents the district that includes the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and is known as a strong supporter of JPL programs, but he no longer serves on the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.  He moved over to the Intelligence Committee and his comments are more likely to focus on those issues.  The latest version (July 21) of the 51-page Democratic party platform has one paragraph about NASA that expresses pride in what it has accomplished and promises to “strengthen support for NASA and work in partnership with the international scientific community to launch new missions into space.”   We didn’t see anything about either commercial or national security space activities in the document.

Within the space policy community, the focus this week will be meetings of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) and its committees all week.  The meetings are at the Ohio Aerospace Center in Cleveland, but will be available by WebEx and telecon for those who cannot attend in person.  This will be the first NAC meeting since Steve Squyres stepped down as chair.  Former astronaut Ken Bowersox has been appointed the interim chair.  He had been chairing the NAC Human Exploration and Operations (NAC/HEO) Committee and Wayne Hale has been appointed to fill that position.

The NAC/HEO committee meets tomorrow and Tuesday.  Michele Gates, program director for the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is on the schedule for 2:30 pm ET tomorrow (Monday) to give an update on ARM, which just went through one of its milestone reviews — Key Decision Point-B or KDP-B — on July 15 to determine whether the project is ready to move into Phase B.  [A description of KDPs and project phases is in the NASA Procedural Requirements (NPR) 7120 document for those keenly interested in NASA program management.]  NASA has not made any announcement about what transpired at the KDP-B review.  We were told nothing would be out until this coming week, so hopefully Gates will provide that information. 

The other NAC committees/task groups meet Monday-Wednesday in advance of the full NAC meeting Thursday and Friday.  Always interesting to listen to if you have the time.

AIAA’s Propulsion and Energy Conference is also on tap this week in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Great line-up of sessions and speakers.   Winner for cleverest title in our view is “Launch Vehicle Reusability:  Holy Grail, Chasing Our Tail, or Somewhere in Between?”  The conference will be livestreamed.  Remember that Utah is in the Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) zone, which is two hours behind Eastern Daylight Time (i.e. 9:00 am MDT is 11:00 am EDT).

Those events and others we know about as of Sunday morning are shown below.  Check back throughout the week for additions to the Events of Interest that we learn about later.   For convenience, we’re grouping all the NAC meetings together rather than listing them day-by-day.  They are listed separately in our Events of Interest list.

NASA Advisory Council (NAC) and its subgroups, Monday-Friday, July 25-29, all at Ohio Aerospace Institute, Cleveland, Ohio and available by WebEx/telecon

• Human Exploration and Operations Committee, Monday-Tuesday
• Science Committee, Monday-Wednesday
• Ad Hoc Task Force on STEM Education, Tuesday (joint with Science Committee 3:15-5:15 pm ET)
• Technology, Innovation, and Engineering Committee, Tuesday
• Aeronautics Committee, Tuesday
• Institutional Committee, Tuesday-Wednesday
• Full NAC, Thursday-Friday

Other Events

Monday-Tuesday, July 25-26

• National Academies Workshop on 2016 Review of NASA’s Evidence Reports for Human Health Risks, Keck Center, 500 5th Street, NW, Washington, DC

Monday-Wednesday, July 25-27

• AIAA Propulsion & Energy Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah (livestreamed)

Monday-Thursday, July 25-28

• Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, PA (former astronaut Mark Kelly scheduled to speak on Wednesday)

Tuesday, July 26

• MSBR Luncheon Featuring NOAA’s Karen St. Germain, Martin’s Crosswinds, Greenbelt, MD, 11:30 am – 1:30 pm ET

Tuesday-Friday, July 26-29

• Enceladus and the Icy Moons of Saturn, Boulder, CO

Here is our list of space policy events for the week of July 17-22, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in recess until September 6.

During the Week

The week starts off with a bang — of rocket engines firing — to launch the SpaceX CRS-9 cargo mission to the International Space Station at 12:45 am Monday.   Today (Sunday), NASA will hold a briefing on what’s aboard the cargo ship at 3:00 pm ET and coverage of the launch begins at 11:30 pm ET.   Watch both on NASA TV.

SpaceX plans to land the Falcon 9 first stage back on a pad at Cape Canaveral a few miles from the launch site. That feat has been done only once before. The other landings were on drone ships out at sea.  The landing burn begins 7 minutes 38 seconds after liftoff (following boostback and entry burns), with landing shortly thereafter.

The bang of a gavel will occur later in the day as the Republicans kick off their presidential convention in Cleveland.  The GOP has released its list of speakers, but it is just a list, not an agenda showing when each will speak.  Perhaps of special interest to readers of this website is that former NASA space shuttle commander Eileen Collins is one of the speakers.   If we learn the day and time, we will post it on our Events of Interest list.

Back-to-back conferences at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California this week will bring together experts interested in the scientific, robotic and human exploration of Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars (Monday-Tuesday), and then a broader group looking at human exploration of those celestial bodies as well as the Moon, Mars, and near-earth asteroids (Wednesday-Friday).  Neither conference website mentions whether webcasts will be available, but such information often is made available only at the last minute.

The 40th anniversary of the landing of NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft on Mars is on Wednesday, July 20.  NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia will celebrate with a history panel on July 19 and a day-long symposium on July 20.  NASA TV will broadcast some of the sessions.

July 20 is also the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The Space Transportation Association (STA) and the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration will hold a meeting that afternoon where Orbital ATK’s Charlie Precourt (a former astronaut) will talk about progress in developing the Space Launch System (SLS).  Orbital ATK is building the solid rocket boosters for SLS and recently completed a successful test firing.

The National Academies’ Space Technology Industry, Government, University Roundtable (STIGUR) will meet at the National Academy of Sciences building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC on Thursday.   The agenda is not posted yet.

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are shown below.  Check back throughout the week for additions to our Events of Interest list.

Sunday, July 17

• NASA Briefing on SpX-9 Cargo, Kennedy Space Center, FL, 3:00 pm ET (watch on NASA TV)

Sunday-Monday, July 17-18

• Launch of SpX-9, Cape Canaveral, FL, 12:45 am ET (NASA TV coverage begins 11:30 pm ET July 17)

Monday-Tuesday

• International Conference on the Exploration of Phobos and Deimos, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

Monday-Thursday, July 18-21

• Republican National Convention, Cleveland, Ohio (former astronaut Eileen Collins is on the list of speakers, date and time TBA)

Tuesday-Wednesday, July 19-20

• Celebration of 40th Anniversary of Viking Landing on Mars, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA

Wednesday, July 20

• STA/Coalition for Deep Space Exploration Meeting Featuring Orbital ATK’s Charlie Precourt on Space Launch System Development, 2325 Rayburn, 3:30-5:30 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, July 20-21

• NASA Advisory Council Astrophysics Subcommittee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC

Wednesday-Friday, July 20-22

• NASA Exploration Science Forum 2016, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

Thursday, July 21

• National Academies Space Technology Industry, Government, University Roundtable, National Academy of Sciences building, 2101 Constitution Ave ., NW, Washington, DC
• NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, 10:15 – 11:45 am ET (audio available)

The House and Senate headed out of town for the summer today, leaving a great deal of work unfinished.  In particular, none of the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government have cleared Congress yet.  They will have four weeks to do something about appropriations when they return after Labor Day.

The extra long (seven week) recess is because of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions that will be held in the next two weeks.  The Republican convention begins in Cleveland on Monday and runs through Thursday (July 18-21).  The Democratic convention in Philadelphia is the following Monday-Thursday (July 25-28). 

The conventions will be followed by the traditional congressional August recess, which, in election years like this, is used mostly for campaigning.

The appropriations bill score sheet looks good in terms of committee action.  All 12 have been reported from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.  Floor action is another matter. 

The House has passed five of the 12 FY2017 appropriations bills:  Defense, Financial Services, Military Construction/Veterans Affairs (Milcon/VA), Legislative Branch, and Interior/Environment.  A sixth bill, Energy-Water, was defeated over inclusion of a gay rights/gender identity amendment to which many Republicans objected.

The Senate passed the Energy/Water bill, and a single bill that combined Milcon/VA, Transportation-HUD, and funding to deal with the Zika virus. 

The two chambers came close to final passage of a compromise Milcon/VA bill that included the Zika funding (but not the Transportation-HUD bill).  The conference report passed the House, but did not survive a cloture vote in the Senate, so is stalled.

Attempts to bring the defense appropriations bill to the Senate floor for debate also failed cloture votes.

The Commerce-Justice-Science bill, which includes NASA and NOAA, did reach the Senate floor, but was derailed by the gun control debate (as its name conveys, the bill also includes funding for the Department of Justice).  The House version has not gone to the floor yet.

Both chambers return on September 6 and will be in session the rest of that month.  Fiscal Year 2017 begins on October 1, so something — likely a Continuing Resolution (CR) — will need to be passed by then. 

This outcome is not unexpected.  Congress’s difficulties in passing appropriations bills is all too well known.  The only question is how long the CR will last.  Almost certainly past the November 8 elections.  Depending on which party wins the White House, the House, and the Senate, final appropriations could be completed by the end of the calendar year, or pushed into 2017 when the new Congress convenes and the new President takes office.

One bill that has made progress is the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  The House and Senate have each passed their versions and formally agreed to go to conference to work out the differences.  Authorization bills set policy and recommend funding levels, but do not provide any money. Only appropriations bills do that, but the NDAA is influential in the decisions made by the appropriations committees.  Conference negotiations on the NDAA are expected to take place at the staff level during the recess.

There has been no action on a new NASA authorization bill this year, although Republican and Democratic Senators at yesterday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on NASA and American leadership in space expressed enthusiasm for passing a bill before the end of the year.  The House passed a FY2015 (yes, 2015, not 2016) bill last year that could be a vehicle for Senate action, or a completely new bill could be introduced.  Although time is getting short, if there is agreement on both sides of the aisle and both sides of Capitol Hill, a bill can pass quickly.  The goal is to provide stability to NASA programs during the presidential transition.  A major area of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats is NASA spending on earth science research.  Republicans on both sides of Capitol Hill argue that it should not be a priority for NASA because other agencies can fund it while NASA focuses on space exploration.  The White House and congressional Democrats argue that earth science research is an essential NASA activity and a critical element of a balanced portfolio of programs.

Correction:  An earlier version of this article stated that the Energy-Water bill passed the House.  That information was based on Congress’s own congress.gov website that has a table showing the status of appropriations bills.  That table indicates there was a vote, but not that the vote failed.  This article has been corrected to state that the bill was defeated.

Here is our list of space policy events for the week of July 11-16, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

The Washington space policy community is still reeling from the news of Molly Macauley’s murder Friday night while walking her dogs near her home in Baltimore.  Molly was one of the most respected and admired members of our relatively small group of space policy analysts and practitioners and was well-known to just about everyone in it.  No word yet on funeral arrangements.  We’ll certainly post any information we get.  Molly was Vice President of Research and a Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank, which has posted a lovely tribute to her.

Meanwhile, the work of the space policy community must go on. This is the last week Congress is scheduled to meet until after Labor Day, so there’s a lot they should be getting done.  Whether they do or not remains to be seen with everyone focused on tragic deaths elsewhere in the country.  Senate leaders tried to bring up the defense appropriations bill last week, but Democrats blocked it.  They’re going to try again tomorrow.  On Friday, the House approved a motion to go to conference on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), so that’s a step in that direction anyway, but authorization bills don’t provide any money.  Only appropriations bills do that.  There’s no indication when the Senate will resume consideration of the Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations bill, which includes NASA and NOAA, and it is not on the House calendar either.  The House and Senate will have four weeks after they return on September 6 to get some sort of appropriations passed to keep the government operating after FY2016 ends on September 30.

There are three congressional hearings about space this week.   First is a House Science, Space, and Technology (SS&T) Committee hearing on “Astronomy, Astrophysics and Astrobiology” with witnesses talking about programs at NASA and the National Science Foundation. That begins at 10:00 am ET on Tuesday.  An hour later (which means the two will overlap), the House Small Business Committee holds a hearing on the role of small business and NASA.  It’s the first time we can think of that that committee has held a space hearing.  Witnesses are from Explore Mars (Beverly, MA), Emergent Space Technologies (Greenbelt, MD), Craig Technologies (Cape Canaveral, FL) and Honeybee Technologies (Brooklyn, NY).

On Wednesday, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) will chair only his third space hearing since becoming chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee’s Space, Science and Competitiveness Subcommittee at the beginning of 2015.   He’s been busy running for President and reportedly will speak at the Republican Convention next week, but on Wednesday he will focus on “NASA At a Crossroads: Reasserting American Leadership in Space Exploration.”  Witnesses are Bill Gerstenmaier from NASA; Mary Lynne Dittmar from the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration; Mike Gold from SSL (formerly Space Systems Loral); Mark Sirangelo from Sierra Nevada Corporation; and Dan Dumbacher, formerly NASA, now at Purdue.  We published summaries of Cruz’s previous two space hearings: February 25, 2015 on U.S. Human Space Exploration Goals and Commercial Space Competitiveness and  March 13, 2015 on NASA’s FY2016 budget request.

The American Astronautical Society, CASIS and NASA will hold the 5th International Space Station R&D conference in San Diego Tuesday-Thursday, with a special pre-conference session tomorrow afternoon on utilization of Japan’s Kibo module.  The conference itself will be webcast — lots of really interesting speakers each day, including a conversation with Mark and Scott Kelly and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta on the Twins Study from Scott Kelly’s 340-day stay aboard ISS.  Remember that all times in the agenda are in Pacific Daylight Time (Eastern Daylight Time – 3).

Two interesting national security space seminars also are on the docket this week. The Hudson Institute holds a meeting on Space and the Right to Self Defense on Wednesday afternoon to discuss a report it just published on that topic. The study director, Hudson Institute Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs, will moderate a discussion with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl.   Thursday morning, the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute will hold a breakfast meeting featuring Elbridge Colby of the Center for a New American Security on U.S. defense and deterrence strategy for space.

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are shown below.  Check back throughout the week for additions to our Events of Interest list.

Monday-Thursday, July 11-15 

• 5th International Space Station R&D Conference (AAS/NASA/CASIS), San Diego, CA (webcast)  [Monday is a pre-conference day; the conference itself is Tuesday-Thursday.  It is not clear if the pre-conference activities on Monday also will be webcast]

Monday-Sunday, July 11-17

• Farnborough Air Show, Farnborough, UK

Tuesday, July 12

• House SS&T Subcommittee hearing on Astronomy, Astrophysics and Astrobiology, 2318 Rayburn, 10:00 am ET (typically webcast)
• House Small Business Subcommittee hearing on Small Business and NASA, 2360 Rayburn, 11:00 am ET (typically webcast)

Tuesday, July 12 – Tuesday, July 19

• Intl Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), Prague, Czech Republic

Wednesday, July 13

• NASA Media Telecon on SpaceX CRS-9 Mission (to be launched July 18), San Diego, CA (in conjunction with the ISS R&D Conference), 2:00 pm ET  Listen on NASA’s News Audio Site
• Senate Commerce Subcommittee Hearing on NASA and Reasserting American Leadership in Space, 253 Russell, 2:30 pm ET (typically webcast)
• Space and the Right to Self Defense (Hudson Inst), 1201 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 3:30-4:30 pm ET (webcast)

Thursday, July 14

• Future Space 2016 (Future Space Leaders Foundation), 106 Dirksen (7:30 am – 12:00 pm ET) followed by luncheon at Reserve Officer Association building across the street (12:30-1:30 pm ET)
• U.S. Defense and Deterrence Strategy for Space (AFA Mitchell Institute), Air Force Association, 1501 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA, 8:00 am ET

Saturday, July 16

• 40th Anniversary of the Landing of Viking on Mars, Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, Denver, CO, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm Mountain Time

This is our list of space policy events for the week of July 4-9, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House returns to work on July 5; the Senate on July 6.  [This posting was updated on July 4.]

During the Week

Monday, July 4, is a federal holiday and government offices officially are closed, but some folks at NASA surely will be on duty because the BIG EVENT for the coming week is the arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter that day.

Miles O’Brien explained in
a recent PBS Newshour segment what Juno will tell us about Jupiter that
the Galileo spacecraft didn’t (basically Galileo was looking at the
cloudtops outward while Juno will look under the clouds down through
Jupiter’s core).  NASA has held a number of pre-arrival briefings already. Another will be broadcast on NASA TV on Monday at noon ET with a mission update. 

NASA TV coverage of orbit insertion begins at 10:30 pm ET and a post-arrival briefing is scheduled for 1:00 am ET July 5. 

The spacecraft will fire its engine at 11:18 pm ET on July 4 for 35 minutes to enter Jupiter’s orbit, ending at 11:53 pm ET.  Everything is automated at this point — either the engine will work properly or it won’t.  The signal travel time from Jupiter to Earth is 48 minutes.  The times here are Earth-receive times accounting for the delay.

Closer to Earth, a new crew will launch to the International Space Station on Wednesday evening Eastern Daylight Time (Thursday GMT, Moscow Time, and local time at the launch site).  The three crew members — NASA’s Kate Rubins, JAXA’s Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos’s Anatoly Ivanishin — will be using an upgraded version of the Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz MS-01.   Since it’s new, they will take the longer 2-day trajectory to the ISS to test everything out, docking early Saturday morning EDT.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, on Thursday, the Environment Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on the nation’s current and next generation weather satellites.  It is a bit unusual in that it blends plans for civil and military weather satellites.  The witness list as of today includes two experts on NOAA’s weather satellite programs — Steve Volz, head of NOAA/NESDIS and the GAO expert who follows those civil weather satellite programs (David Powner), and two on DOD’s weather satellite program — Ralph Stoffler, Director of Weather in the office of the USAF Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and the GAO expert on military satellites (Cristina Chaplain).  Subcommittee chairman Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) serves on both this subcommittee and the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) which may explain the decision to hold a combined hearing on the weather satellite plans for both NOAA and DOD.  House SS&T typically webcasts its hearings on its website and YouTube.

The events we know about as of Monday, July 4, are listed below.  Check back throughout the week for additions to our Events of Interest list.

Monday-Tuesday, July 4-5 ET

• Arrival of the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter (watch on NASA TV)
  • July 4, 12:00 pm ET, pre-orbit insertion briefing
  • July 4, 10:30 pm ET, orbit insertion and NASA commentary
  • July 5, 1:00 am ET, post-orbit insertion briefing

Wednesday, July 6

• Soyuz MS-01 launch to ISS, 9:36 pm ET (watch on NASA TV)

Thursday, July 7

• House SS&T Sbcmte Hrg on Weather Satellites, 2318 Rayburn, 10:00 am ET
• NASA Briefing with Upcoming ISS Crew (to be launched in September), Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, 2:00 pm ET (watch on NASA TV)

Saturday, July 9

• Soyuz MS-01 docking at ISS, 12:12 am ET (watch on NASA TV)

Note:  This article, orignally published June 30, 2016, was updated throughout on July 4, 2016.

Here is our list of space policy events for the week of June 27 – July 1, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The Senate is in session part of the week. The House is in recess for the July 4 holiday.

During the Week

The House left town early last week in disarray after Democrats staged a gun control sit-in. It already was scheduled to be off this week and will return on July 5.  The Senate is taking only a short July 4th breather.  It will be in session Monday-Thursday and return on July 6. On Monday it will resume consideration of the FY2017 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill that includes NASA and NOAA.  Both chambers will meet the first two weeks of July and then take a 7-week recess for the political conventions and their usual August recess, returning on September 5-6.  They don’t have a lot of time to get appropriations bills completed before the fiscal year ends on September 30.

Orbital ATK will have the second and final qualification test for the solid rocket boosters for the Space Launch System on Tuesday at its Promontory, Utah test site.  NASA TV will cover the 2-minute test live and a media teleconference shortly thereafter will be available on NASA’s News Audio site.

Up at the International Space Station (ISS), Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Oleg Skripochka will test out a new manual docking system for Russia’s Progress cargo spacecraft on Friday (VERY early Eastern Daylight Time).  Progress MS-01 (Progress 62 in NASA parlance) is currently docked to the Pirs module.  It will undock and then be redocked using the manual system, a backup in case the automated Kurs system doesn’t work properly.  The Progress MS series is the latest version of that cargo spacecraft, in use since 1978, and Russia is also getting ready to launch the first Soyuz MS, the latest variant of that spacecraft.  The first Soyuz was launched in 1967. The Soyuz MS-01 launch is now scheduled for July 6 EDT (July 7 local time at the launch site) after a delay reportedly related to its new Kurs system.  The Kurs system for Progress MS and Soyuz MS is the same and the NASA press release said the test would verify software and a new signal converter for the manual docking system “in the unlikely event the ‘Kurs’ automated rendezvous in either craft encounters a problem.”   Progress MS-01 will undock for a final time on July 2 and reenter (burning up on the way down — SpaceX’s Dragon is the only ISS cargo spacecraft designed to survive reentry).

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is getting closer and closer to Jupiter, with orbital insertion next Monday (July 4).  There will be three briefings that day, but two pre-arrival briefings will be held this Thursday at JPL.  They will be webcast.

Thursday also is Asteroid Day, “a global awareness campaign” with events around the world to learn about asteroids “and what we can do to protect our planet …”   It is an independent effort founded by Britain’s Brian May (the Queen guitarist and astrophysicist), B612’s Danica Remy and Rusty Schweickert, and film director Grigorij Richters and with support from the European Space Agency (ESA).  Thursday is June 30, the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska (Russia) event, the most destructive meteor airburst of modern times.

To close out the week, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC is celebrating its 40th anniversary and has invited the public to a family friendly “All Night at the Museum” from 9:00 pm Friday to 10:00 am Saturday with special guests stopping by, all night films and lots of other fun activities.  The official re-opening of the renovated Boeing Milestones of Flight gallery is at 8:30 pm ET.  That and other Friday evening activities will be covered by C-SPAN.

Those and other events we know about as of Saturday afternoon are shown below.  Check back throughout the week for additional events we learn about later and add to our  Events of Interest list.

Tuesday, June 28

• Orbital ATK Booster Test, Promontory, Utah, 10:05 am ET (8:05 am local time); NASA TV coverage begins 9:30 am ET
• NASA Media telecon on Orbital ATK Test, 11:00 am ET (listen on NASA’s News Audio site)

Tuesday-Wednesday, June 28-29

• MilSatCom USA, Sheraton Pentagon City, Arllngton, VA

Tuesday-Thursday, June 28-30

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Big Data Task Force, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
• NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), JHU Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, MD

Wednesday, June 29

• NAC Ad Hoc STEM Task Force, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm ET (WebEx/telecon)

Thursday, June 30

• Asteroid Day, various times and locations around the world
• Juno Spacecraft Arrival at Juno — Pre-Arrival Briefings, JPL, Pasadena, CA, 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm ET (webcast)

Friday, July 1

• Test of New Progress Docking System at the ISS, Earth Orbit, undocking 1:36 am ET, redocking 2:10 am ET (NASA TV coverage begins 1:15 am ET)
• C-SPAN Coverage of 40th Anniversary Events at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, 6:00-9:00 pm ET

Friday-Saturday, July 1-2

• All Night at the Museum, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC (family friendly event to spend the night there in celebration of its 40th anniversary), 9:00 pm – 10:00 am ET

Here is our list of space policy events for the week of June 20-25, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

The Senate is scheduled to continue debate on the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill this week, which funds NASA and NOAA   It got off to a rocky start last week when a Democratic filibuster over gun control in the wake of the Orlando tragedy held up action for about a day (as its name implies, the bill also funds the Department of Justice), but agreement was reached to allow votes on gun control amendments and debate on the bill resumed.  The House schedule for the coming week still was not posted as of Sunday afternoon.  The House meets only in pro forma session tomorrow, then will meet for legislative business Tuesday-Friday before taking off a week plus a bit for the July 4 holiday.

On Wednesday, the Aviation Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee will hold a rare hearing on commercial space transportation.  The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) is under the jurisdiction of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, but T&I has jurisdiction over the rest of the FAA and some commercial space transportation-related activities are handled by other parts of the FAA.  For FY2017, for example, in addition to the $19.8 million for AST, FAA is requesting $2.0 million as part of a $20 million request for Air Traffic Management (ATM) in the Facilities and Equipment (F&E) account and $2.953 million for commercial space transportation safety in the Research, Engineering and Development (RE&D) account.  The ATM funding is for integrating commercial launches into the National Air Space, a growing issue with the rise in the number of orbital and suborbital launches — and in the case of the Dragon spacecraft, landings — that require aircraft to avoid certain areas.  FAA/AST head George Nield, COMSTAC’s Mike Gold and Michael Lopez-Alegria, GAO’s Gerald Dillingham, and Taber MacCallum from World View Enterprises are the witnesses.  World View Enterprises plans high altitude (stratospheric) balloon flights for tourists and counts Alan Stern and Mark Kelly as members of its executive team.

Speaking of launches, NASA Wallops Flight Facility Director Bill Wrobel will speak to the Maryland Space Business Roundtable on Tuesday.  Wallops is getting ready for the return to flight of Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket, although that has been delayed to August.

Still speaking of launches, China reportedly is getting ready for the first launch of yet another new rocket from a brand new launch site, possibly on Saturday.  China had inaugural launches of two new rockets last year, both at the smaller end of the capability scale (Long March 6 and Long March 11) from existing launch sites.  The upcoming launch is the first from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island.  China has not officially announced a launch date, but there are rumors it will be on June 25 (which might be June 24 Eastern Daylight Time depending on the launch time).  China has big plans for Wenchang, which will also be the home of the new Long March 5 rocket, expected to achieve its first launch later this year.  Long March 7 is a mid-sized rocket (13.5 metric tons to LEO), while Long March 5 will be China’s most capable rocket ever at 25 metric tons to LEO.   (The largest U.S. rocket is the Delta IV, which can place 28.4 metric tons into LEO.)  The newer Long March rockets use more environmentally friendly fuel and are intended eventually to replace the older models (Long March 2, 3 and 4).

Also on Saturday, Politicon 2016 will be starting in Pasadena, CA.  The Planetary Society (TPS) has a panel discussion scheduled for 2:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time on “How We Get to Mars.”   A June 16 tweet from TPS’s Director of Advocacy Casey Dreier identifies the panelists as TPS CEO Bill Nye, former Hill staffer Bill Adkins (now President of Adkins Strategies, LLC), and former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver (now General Manager of the Air Line Pilots Association).

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday afternoon are shown below.  Check back throughout the week for new items added to our Events of Interest list that we learn about later.

Tuesday, June 21

• ESA Press Conference with Astronaut Tim Peake (who just returned from the ISS), Cologne, Germany, 7:00 am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 local time in Germany) Webcast
• MSBR Luncheon Featuring NASA Wallops Flight Facility Director Bill Wrobel, Martin’s Crosswinds, Greenbelt, MD, 11:30 am – 1:30 pm EDT

Tuesday-Thursday, June 21-23

• NewSpace 2016, Seattle, Washington

Wednesday, June 22

• House Transportation & Infrastructure Sbcmt Hrg on Commercial Space Transportation, 2167 Rayburn, 10:00 am EDT (webcast)

Saturday, June 25

• POSSIBLE launch of China’s new Long March 7 rocket, confirmation and details pending (possibly June 24 EDT depending on launch time)
• Mars panel at Politicon 2016, Pasadena Convention Center, Pasadena, CA, 2:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time