The Japanese commercial lunar lander company ispace announced today that its SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon lander and rover will reach lunar orbit on May 6 and land one month later on June 6 JST (June 5 EDT)).  Venture Moon launched on January 15 on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed yesterday, but is taking a longer route. This is ispace’s second attempt at a lunar landing after a failure in 2023.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of March 2-9, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

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Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 landed on the Moon early this morning.  The third of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS missions, the commercial lunar lander delivered 10 NASA payloads to Mare Crisium.  Another CLPS mission, Intuitive Machines’ IM-2, will land just four days from now as NASA uses these small robotic landers to gather data in support of the Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface and to begin an era of commercial exploration and utilization of the Moon.

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NOAA is the latest federal agency hit hard by layoffs ordered by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spearheaded by Elon Musk. The office that issues licenses to companies operating commercial remote sensing satellites, part of the Office of Space Commerce, no longer has any senior personnel to do that job, for example.  Court challenges are underway against other DOGE firings. The situation at NOAA and elsewhere in the federal government is one of disarray.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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