Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has announced the crew of its next New Shepard suborbital mission, NS-31. The passengers are all female and include CBS journalist Gayle King, pop superstar Katy Perry, and Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez who “brought the mission together.” The launch will take place at an unspecified time this spring. Blue Origin just completed the NS-30 flight with six passengers two days ago.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket this evening with a commercial lunar lander and a NASA lunar orbiter among other payloads. The Athena lander, the second built by Intuitive Machines (IM-2), carries a total of 10 payloads for NASA and commercial customers including NASA’s PRIME-1 drill, IM’s Grace “hopper,” and Lunar Outpost’s MAPP micro-rover. IM-2 joins two other commercial landers, one American and the other Japanese, already enroute to Moon. Also onboard the rocket was NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer that will not land, but instead go into orbit and map water on the lunar surface.
Republicans and Democrats on a key House committee made clear today their support for NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface — and only then go on to Mars — is solid. But the need to move faster was a dominant theme, especially to ensure U.S. astronauts are back on the Moon before China’s taikonauts arrive by 2030. Changes may be needed as NASA implements the first Trump Administration’s directive to establish a sustainable presence on the Moon with commercial and international partners.
President Trump’s directive to build an “Iron Dome for America” is getting a name change. Instead of Iron Dome, it now is Golden Dome. The purpose is the same — build a missile defense system to protect the United States from foreign missile threats.
As many scientists expected, further observations of asteroid 2024 YR4 have reduced the chances of it colliding with Earth to basically zero. The asteroid made headlines a month ago when it appeared it had a small chance of impacting our planet in 2032. However, NASA is not ruling out the possibility it might hit the Moon instead.
NASA announced today that Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche is now Acting Associate Administrator, succeeding Jim Free who retired over the weekend. Cathy Koerner, who has been leading the mission directorate that manages the Artemis program, will retire this Friday. Her Deputy, Lori Glaze, will take over on an acting basis.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of February 23-March 2, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
Posts by Elon Musk on his social media platform X took aim at the International Space Station today, arguing it should be deorbited much sooner than NASA plans. Separately he again insisted that two NASA astronauts who have unexpectedly remained aboard the ISS since last summer, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, were left there by the Biden Administration for political reasons. NASA issued two statements this afternoon and while they did not directly reference Musk’s posts, the connection seemed apparent.
NASA said today that probationary employees will not be subject to the mass firings happening elsewhere in the government. Instead, any decisions to dismiss them will be performance-based or voluntary. Probationary employees were a small subset of the 5 percent of the NASA workforce who chose the Deferred Resignation buyout. All who did are individually deciding when to depart, with September 30 as the deadline.
The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee said today it will hold a hearing on NASA’s Artemis program next week. Artemis is designed to return U.S. astronauts to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo, but its future has become the subject of intense speculation since President Trump took office. The program is years late, over budget, and Trump confidant Elon Musk is a critic, although his company, SpaceX, is an Artemis major contractor. The hearing does not include any witnesses from the Trump Administration, however.