The House passed a bill today (December 16) to protect heritage sites on the Moon like the Apollo 11 landing site. The version passed today apparently incorporates changes made after it passed the Senate, so will have to go back there for passage before being sent to the President for signature.  The House also passed a bill to rename an Ohio NASA facility in honor of Neil Armstrong. [UPDATE: The Senate concurred in the House-passed lunar heritage sites bill, S. 1694, by voice vote on December 19, 2020. The President signed it into law on December 31, 2020.]

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China’s Chang’e-5 lunar sample return capsule successfully landed in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region today (EST). Recovery teams quickly located the capsule on the cold, snowy ground at about 2:30 am local time December 17. It fulfills China’s goal of robotically collecting and returning samples from the Moon, its first such mission and the first to do so since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976. The last time the United States returned lunar samples was the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

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NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced today that a Canadian astronaut will be one of the crew members on the next mission to the Moon, Artemis II.  Scheduled for 2023, it will fly around the Moon as the crewed test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft. Canada has four active astronauts, but a decision has not yet been made as to who will make the trip.

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has confirmed that the Hayabusa2 spacecraft did indeed obtain samples of the asteroid Ryugu that are now back on Earth. It had no method to determine how much, if any, material was collected when Hayabusa2 touched down on Ryugu until it could open the capsule after its return.

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As the U.S. Space Force gets ready to celebrate its first anniversary five days from now, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond says he has met with the Biden transition team and had a very good conversation. The Space Force was created by law with bipartisan support, but many attribute it to President Trump. Some speculate that with Trump’s departure, the Space Force’s existence may be endangered even though there has been no indication of that so far.

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President-elect Joe Biden’s Agency Review Team for NASA is hard at work engaging with the agency and the space industry according to two people involved in those activities. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris officially won the Electoral College vote today 306-232 and will take office on January 20, 2021. …

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Russia conducted a second test flight of its new Angara-5 rocket today almost exactly six years after the first. The head of Russia’s space agency excitedly exclaimed “It flies, damn it” in a tweet, perhaps conveying a sense of frustration at how long it has taken. He said there will be two Angara-5 launches next year as Russia tries to regain its once storied reputation in the space launch business.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of December 13-19, 2020 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

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The Senate passed two important pieces of legislation today after a Senator who had been filibustering one of them relented. The bills already passed the House, so now go to President Trump for signature. He is threatening to veto one of them, the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but is expected to sign the other, a one-week extension of a Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government operating until December 18. [Update: Trump signed the CR.]

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NASA officials said today they are still aiming towards the first launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) in November 2021 even though the last two core stage tests in the Green Run series have been delayed. The seventh of eight tests was paused earlier this week because of operational issues in loading liquid oxygen. That will push the date for delivering the core stage to Kennedy Space Center until February, squeezing the rest of the schedule to get ready for launch.

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