NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro enthusiastically endorsed NASA’s space science program today in an address to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Noting the exciting missions already enroute to their destinations and under development, she was careful in talking about the future, however. While acknowledging rumors about impending cuts, she could not confirm if they have substance.
Four private astronauts lifted off from Kennedy Space Center this evening on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. They are the first humans to orbit the Earth circling around the North and South Poles, giving them a unique view of the planet. Fram2 takes its name from a Norwegian ship, Fram, that explored the Arctic and Antarctic at the turn of the 20th Century. The privately-funded mission includes a Chinese-born billionaire who now is a citizen of Malta, a Norwegian, a German, and an Australian.
The two NASA astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, but returned on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, will soon meet with Boeing’s leadership about getting Starliner ready to fly again. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams pushed back on questions about assigning blame for Starliner’s woes during their Crew Flight Test last summer and insist it is a very capable spacecraft.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of March 30-April 5, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
NASA’s Artemis II crewed test flight is just over a year away. That April 2026 mission appears to be on track, but questions remain about whether the next flight, Artemis III, will be ready to put a crew on the lunar surface and return them to Earth in mid-2027. SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System is a critical element that still has to demonstrate a number of technical milestones, including a precursor uncrewed landing — and liftoff — from the Moon.
The U.S. Space Force certified the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA’s) Vulcan rocket today, making it eligible to launch national security satellites. Two successful test flights are needed to win certification. The first went perfectly in January 2024, but a hiccup with the second in October delayed the process until now.
As NASA’s space science program faces an uncertain funding future, the director of one of the country’s top space science laboratories cites lower launch costs, higher risk tolerance for robotic missions, and technological advancements as factors that could help the balance sheet. But keeping a steady cadence of competed missions in the Discovery and New Frontiers series is critical for the planetary science ecosystem.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of March 23-29, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
Firefly Aerospace’s first mission to the Moon was a complete success according to the company and its customer, NASA. The Blue Ghost Mission-1 (BGM-1) lander operated for the entire 14-days of its expected lifetime, operating all 10 NASA experiments and transmitting amazing images of the lunar surface, a Sun-Earth eclipse, and lunar sundown. BGM-1’s lifetime on the Moon may have come to an end, but analysis of the 51 gigabytes of science data it sent back is just beginning.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams and their Crew-9 crewmates Nick Hague and Aleksandr (“Alex”) Gorbunov splashed down near Florida this afternoon. Butch and Suni’s extended stay on the ISS captured a great deal of attention although at 286 days they are well short of the 371-day record set by Frank Rubio for the longest U.S. space mission.