NASA has a new 20-year plan for robotic exploration of Mars that calls for major paradigm shifts in how the agency approaches exploration of the Red Planet. The future should focus on smaller missions, more commercial and international engagement, and defining science goals for an era of human presence on Mars. The plan does not address the Mars Sample Return program, which is organizationally separate from the rest of the agency’s robotic science Mars efforts.

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The FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act cleared the House today. Congress has passed an NDAA every year since the first in 1961 regardless of rancorous divisions and appears on track to keep that record intact this year. The Senate is expected to take up the bill next week.

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Panama and Austria signed the Artemis Accords today. That brings to 50 the number of countries that have signed the U.S.-led non-binding principles for responsible behavior on the Moon in just over four years.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of December 8-14, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

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ESA’s Vega-C rocket returned to flight today almost two years after a failure that contributed to Europe’s loss of space launch autonomy. Coupled with delays in development of the large Ariane 6, Europe has had to buy launches from the U.S. company SpaceX, but the successful first launch of Ariane 6 this summer and Vega-C’s flight today puts Europe back in the space launch business.

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NASA’s program to return American astronauts to the Moon is encountering more delays. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced today that the second flight, Artemis II, is now planned for April 2026 instead of September 2025, and Artemis III for mid-2027 instead of September 2026. Nelson nonetheless is optimistic the incoming Trump Administration will continue Artemis now that it is on a firm path forward to get Americans back on the Moon before China gets there.

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President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Jared Isaacman as his nominee to be the next NASA Administrator. Isaacman is a tech industry billionaire who has flown two spaceflights on Elon Musk’s Crew Dragon spacecraft already, with another pending plus the first crewed flight to Earth orbit on Starship. Isaacman’s most recent Crew Dragon flight, Polaris Dawn, included the first commercial spacewalks.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of December 1-7, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

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NASA has provided more details of its decision to cancel the VIPER robotic lunar rover mission in response to a letter from a key House committee.  It doesn’t specifically answer how it now will obtain the data VIPER was to glean, but offers some insight into the agency’s surprise decision to terminate a spacecraft that was already built and partially through pre-launch tests, yet continue the $323 million services contract to land it on the Moon.

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Japan’s efforts to develop the Epsilon S rocket suffered another setback when the engine exploded during a test on Tuesday (Japan time).  A test last year ended the same way. Epsilon S is an improved version of the Epsilon small rocket in development for almost two decades by JAXA and IHI Industries to compete on the world market for launches of cubesats and other small satellites.

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