The project scientist for NASA’s VIPER lunar rover said today the spacecraft has successfully completed all of its pre-launch tests, but its future remains uncertain. NASA intends to terminate the mission even though it is completely built because of concerns about potential future cost overruns. NASA invited other organizations to submit proposals to take over the program as long as there is no further cost to the agency and is evaluating them to determine if there is a path forward.

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China launched a new crew to the Tiangong-3 space station today. The three person — two men and a woman — Shenzhou-19 crew will replace the three taikonauts who have been aboard the space station since April.  Although China is years behind the United States and Russia in operating permanently occupied space stations, and Tiangong-3 is much smaller than the International Space Station, over the past two years they have settled into a similar crew-rotation regime allowing them to conduct scientific experiments and learn how humans adapt to long durations in weightlessness.

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Here are links to all the articles published on SpacePolicyOnline.com from October 21-27, 2024 including our “What’s Happening in Space Policy” for this coming week. Click on each title to read the entire article.

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NASA has identified the root cause of the unexpected char loss on Orion’s heat shield after it returned from the Artemis I uncrewed test flight to the Moon almost two years ago.  Solving the problem is required before the next mission, Artemis II, can launch with a crew of four. How to do that is still under discussion, with testing underway. The heat shield for Artemis II is already built so options are limited. A NASA official said today the NASA Administrator will make the final decision on how to proceed.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of October 27-November 3, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess until after the November 5 elections except for pro forma sessions.

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The NASA astronaut who was hospitalized yesterday after returning from an eight-month spaceflight is now back in Houston. For privacy reasons, NASA will not provide any details about which of the three NASA astronauts was taken ill or why, only that the astronaut was taken to a Pensacola hospital and remained there overnight for observation.

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The four-person crew of the NASA/SpaceX Crew-8 mission is back on terra firma once again, two months later than planned. The quartet splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola this morning after almost eight months in space. However, about four hours after splashdown NASA announced that the crew had been taken to a local medical facility. Several hours later it added that three of the four had returned to Houston, but one remains in a Pensacola hospital under observation. Due to privacy concerns, NASA is not identifying who it is other than it is one of the NASA astronauts. 

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The Aerospace Corporation is out with a set of 16 papers identifying key space issues facing the next Administration and Congress, whoever wins the election. Space Agenda 2025 covers a wide range of civil, commercial and national security space topics focusing on how to strengthen U.S. leadership and competitiveness and offering a framework to address them.

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Crew-8 undocked from the International Space Station this afternoon, two months later than planned. Their mission was extended first while NASA was deciding what to do about Boeing’s Starliner crew and then by a long stretch of bad weather around Florida. The weather is finally good enough for them to splash down either in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico early Friday morning after more than eight months in space.

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The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is seeking a new director to succeed Ralph Semmel who will retire next summer. JHUAPL encompasses four sectors:  Air and Missile Defense, Asymmetric Operations, Force Projection, and Space.  The space sector has built and operated many spacecraft for DOD and NASA with more on the way including Dragonfly, an octocopter that will fly over the dunes of Saturn’s moon Titan.

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