The long-awaited announcement of the four crew members who will travel beyond the Moon and back on the Artemis II mission is just a few weeks away. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said today the names of the three Americans and one Canadian will be publicly revealed on April 3. The launch is currently planned for November 2024.
For the third year in a row, President Biden is requesting a significant increase in NASA funding, apparently undeterred by the results in the last two years. Although Congress increased NASA’s budget over prior year funding, it was not as much as requested. This time he is asking for $27.2 billion, a $1.8 billion increase or 7.1 percent more than the $25.4 billion appropriated for FY2023. Among the highlights is a request to develop a new space tug to deorbit the International Space Station at the end of its lifetime instead of relying on Russian spacecraft as currently planned.
A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee unanimously approved five bills today dealing with allocating spectrum for satellite services. One broadly addresses assignment of spectrum for non-government satellites by the Federal Communications Commission, while the others target specific uses like precision agriculture and emergency services.
Relativity Space tried hard to launch its innovative Terran-1 rocket today, but in the end it was a no-go because of thermal problems with the propellant. Late this evening they said they will try again on Saturday to launch the “Good Luck, Have Fun” mission.
Japan’s launch of its new H3 rocket with an earth observing satellite onboard failed tonight when the second stage apparently failed to ignite. The first stage seemed to perform perfectly and separated from the second stage, but it is not clear what happened after that. Ground controllers sent a destruct command to the second stage when it became evident a failure of some sort had occurred. …
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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of March 5-11, 2023 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
NASA’s Crew-6 docked to the International Space Station on March 3 after solving another problem with a hook in the SpaceX Crew Dragon nose cone. SpaceX had to send a software update to override data that indicated Hook 5 was not properly positioned after verifying that it was, in fact, OK. An earlier issue with the same hook, one of 12, forced ground controllers to use a backup system to open the nose cone after the spacecraft reached orbit a day earlier. A faulty sensor was blamed in both cases.
Liftoff of four crew members to the International Space Station went off without a hitch at 12:34 am ET this morning. It was the second try, following a scrub on Monday caused by a technical problem with ground equipment. This time the launch went perfectly and Crew-6 is in orbit and on the way to a docking about 24 hours from now.
NASA and SpaceX will try again to launch the next crew to the International Space Station in a few hours at 12:34 am March 2. The first attempt was scrubbed early Monday morning due to a ground equipment issue. The four-person Crew-6 aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour will replace Crew-5. In a post-departure news conference from the ISS today, Crew-5 shared what they are looking forward to most when they get back to Earth.