NASA is targeting a two-week window in February 2022 for Artemis I, the uncrewed test flight of the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft. A lot of work remains to be done, including a dress rehearsal planned for January, so the timeframe is tentative, but the announcement is a sign that the long-awaited launch is drawing near. Artemis I is the first step in NASA’s effort to return American astronauts to the lunar surface five decades after the last Apollo crew departed.

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Witnesses at a Senate hearing on international collaboration and competition in space today stressed that a continued human U.S. presence in low Earth orbit is key to international leadership in space. The International Space Station is more than 20 years old and Congress and NASA continue to debate what should replace it and when. The Senate passed a new NASA authorization bill earlier this year that begins to address it, but Senators expressed frustration that action is stalled in the House.

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Ken Hodgkins, who recently retired after two decades as the point man for space policy at the State Department, has joined with Sohair Salam Saber to create the Off-World Approach as part of The Hague Institute for Global Justice. Their goal is to bring together space experts from around the world to formulate solutions that ensure the future of space is peaceful, inclusive, and equitable.

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Boeing and NASA made it official today — the next attempt to launch the second uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT-2) of the Starliner commercial crew spacecraft will not happen until sometime in the first half of 2022. Both had been hinting at the length of the delay while expressing confidence that the problems that scrubbed the last attempt in August will be resolved. Boeing reiterated its “100 percent” commitment to the program even though the company must absorb the additional costs.

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The Senate Appropriations Committee rebuked the NOAA division that oversees the Office of Space Commerce for not following through on direction to create a Space Traffic Management (STM) pilot program. In its report on the just-released FY2022 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill, the committee recommended the office be moved under the direct supervision of the head of NOAA and its budget doubled. Advocates want it moved even further up the chain of command to the Office of the Secretary of Commerce, but Congress has not been willing to go that far.

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The Senate Appropriations Committee released the FY2022 appropriations bill that funds NASA today, skipping over subcommittee and full committee markups as it did last year. The Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill provides $24.837 billion for NASA, almost the same as the request.  While it adds $100 million for a second lunar landing system, it is not enough to pay for two suppliers.

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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft started its journey to the Trojan asteroids with a successful launch yesterday, but today the agency said one of the two solar arrays, critical to mission success, may not be properly latched. Still, the arrays are producing power and charging the battery, so the long term consequences are yet to be determined. More information could come out tomorrow at an already scheduled meeting on NASA’s space science missions.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 17-23, 2021 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

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The $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has safely arrived at its launch site in South America after a 16-day journey at sea from California through the Panama Canal. Years late and billions over budget, NASA does not want to repeat JWST’s history on its next flagship astrophysics mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but the COVID-19 pandemic just added $382 million to its price tag.

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China is set to launch its next space station crew, Shenzhou-13, for a six-month mission on the Tianhe core space station module. Launch is set for 12:23 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) tomorrow, October 15 (October 16, 12:23 am Beijing Time) from China’s Jiuquan launch site in the Gobi desert. [UPDATE, October 15 EDT: the launch was successful.]

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