The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved its version of the FY2021 defense authorization bill yesterday and shared some of its provisions today. Among them, the committee prohibits DOD from spending money to comply with the FCC’s decision to allow Ligado to use frequencies close to those used for the GPS system until certain conditions are met. DOD and many SASC members strongly oppose the FCC decision.
Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic has won a $199.5 million contract to deliver NASA’s VIPER lunar rover to the South Pole of the Moon in 2023. The price includes launch from Earth through delivery on the Moon, but not the rover itself. …
The much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope will miss its latest launch date, March 2021, but not because of mismanagement. This time the culprit is the coronavirus pandemic. The head of NASA’s science program said definitively today it will not launch in March, but he is optimistic it will sometime next year. He had better news about NASA’s other top priority science mission, Mars Perseverance. That remains on track for launch next month despite a slight delay that pushes the first opportunity to July 20 — coincidentally the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
The National Space Council’s Scott Pace and NASA’s Ken Bowersox both expressed concern about getting the money needed to execute the Artemis program today. Pace thinks that even if Congress approves the 12 percent increase for NASA this year, the agency’s budget will grow only at the rate of inflation thereafter. Bowersox said although Congress has given NASA a lot of money already, he senses they are not yet convinced of the need to get back to the Moon by 2024.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of June 7-13, 2020 and any insight we can offer about them. The Senate is in session this week. The House is in a “Committee Work Day” period all week.
The Trump Campaign took down an ad today that included footage from the launch of Crew Dragon on Saturday and touting what it claimed was the President’s role in the program. It included video of the two NASA astronauts, both civil servants, as well as their wives and young children waving goodbye. One of the spouses, a former NASA astronaut, strongly objected to use of the video of her and her son for “political propaganda.”
The top civil servant at NASA said today that the agency is actively looking for someone to replace Doug Loverro as the head of the human spaceflight program and hopes to name someone within weeks, not months. It took three months to find Loverro and another two before he reported for duty in December 2019. His sudden departure less than six months later adds turmoil to the effort to get astronauts back on the Moon by 2024.
On their first full day aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the crew of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour and their ISS crew mate Chris Cassidy introduced two “zero gravity indicators” — a toy dinosaur and a plush toy Little Earth — to a television audience as they thanked the SpaceX team for all the work that got them safely to orbit.
Arnie Aldrich, a highly respected and warmly regarded member of the aerospace community, passed away on May 28 after a short battle with cancer. He was 83.
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two NASA astronauts checking out SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on its Demo-2 test flight, arrived aboard the International Space Station today. They were welcomed by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and his two Russian crewmates, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who looked very happy to have their ranks increased to five. NASA will not decide for a month or so how long the Demo-2 crew will stay, but the goal is at least one month and perhaps as many as four.