Laurie Leshin, President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has been chosen as the new director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, succeeding Michael Watkins. A planetary scientist at Arizona State University who moved to NASA and then returned to academia, she was the first woman President of WPI and will become the first woman JPL Director when she takes office in May.
Today is NASA’s annual Day of Remembrance honoring the nation’s fallen astronauts. This year it is commemorated on the 55th anniversary of the first U.S. human spaceflight tragedy, the fire that killed the Apollo 1 crew during a pre-launch test. As NASA readies its new Artemis system to return astronauts to the Moon while increasing its reliance on commercial partnerships for other human spaceflight missions, the agency’s safety advisors are urging caution.
The House bill to parallel the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act to ensure U.S. competitiveness with China has finally been introduced. The Senate version passed last summer incorporating other measures including a NASA authorization act and legislation related to space traffic management. They are not included in this House bill.
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) announced today that he will not run for reelection. A highly influential member of the House Armed Services Committee on national security space policy issues, Cooper was one half of the bipartisan congressional duo that led to creation of the U.S. Space Force.
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope arrived at its destination a million miles from Earth today after a month-long journey. At 2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, NASA fired the spacecraft’s thrusters for 5 minutes, putting it into a halo orbit around a point in space called the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point-2, or L2 for short.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of January 23-29, 2022 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess this week except for pro forma sessions.
Bobby Braun, JPL’s Director for Planetary Science, will succeed Mike Ryschkewitsch as Space Exploration Sector Head at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab at the end of March. Braun’s long career in space technology includes positions at Georgia Tech, the University of Colorado Boulder, NASA Langley Research Center, and NASA Headquarters where he led the effort to create the Space Technology Mission Directorate.
NASA is targeting the end of March for Artemis I, the first launch of the Space Launch System rocket with an uncrewed Orion spacecraft. The actual date is yet to be determined, but the agency is confident enough to open the process for media to apply to cover the launch at Kennedy Space Center. The agency official in charge of the initiative also laid out a tentative schedule for future Artemis missions showing the U.S. human return to the Moon in 2025.
NASA confirmed today that the risk of orbital debris penetrating the International Space Station has doubled because of Russia’s recent antisatellite test. Shards from the destroyed Russian satellite careened towards the ISS, forcing the seven crewmembers, including two Russians, to secure in place for a day until the immediate threat passed. But the long-term threat remains from the increase in the background debris field. U.S. officials and other experts are calling for an end to debris-generating ASAT tests.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of January 16-22, 2022 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.