Today NASA and Boeing gave a thumbs up for the May 6 launch of Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test. The long-awaited CFT mission with two NASA astronauts hopefully will be the final step in certifying Starliner as the second commercial crew space transportation system to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
China continued its new pattern of space station crew exchanges today with the launch of the three-man Shenzhou-18 crew. They docked with the Tiangong-3 space station 6.5 hours after launch and will replace the Shenzhou-17 crew for what has become routine 6-month stays similar to those on the International Space Station.
Japan’s lunar lander is defying all the odds, surviving yet another bitter cold lunar night. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, landed in January and was expected to survive for only a few days. Instead, it woke up yesterday after a third 14-day lunar night and sent back another photo of its surroundings.
Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution today that would have reaffirmed the provision in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibiting nations from placing nuclear weapons in Earth orbit. Recent reports that Russia may be planning to do just that surprised and worried many space-faring countries. Russian President Putin said publicly Russia has no intention of putting a nuclear weapon in orbit, but U.S. officials point out if that were true, Russia would not have vetoed the resolution.
The plucky Voyager 1 spacecraft has another lease on life as it continues its voyage through interstellar space. The 46-year old spacecraft, billions of miles from home, began sending unintelligible data back to Earth in November, but engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory figured out what was wrong and devised a remedy.
Here are links to all the articles published on SpacePolicyOnline.com over the last week, April 15-21, 2024, including our “What’s Happening in Space Policy” for this coming week. Click on each title to read the entire article.
While speculation about Russian nuclear weapons in space and actual destructive antisatellite tests grab the headlines, experts from two organizations that track “counterspace” activities are pointing out more immediate threats to satellite systems do not require such sophistication. Jamming or spoofing navigation satellites or hacking communications satellite ground terminals is much easier and can be disruptive not just to militaries, but the civilian population.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of April 21-27, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House is in recess except for pro forma sessions. The Senate’s schedule is uncertain.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson fielded questions from House Appropriations committee members today about why the FY2025 budget request includes cuts to programs in some of their districts. The answer was that budget caps imposed by last year’s Fiscal Responsibility Act forced NASA to make tough choices. While he understands why Congress had to agree to those caps in order to avoid defaulting on the national debt, the end result is that NASA simply cannot afford everything on its plate.
NASA’s intrepid Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, sent its last transmission back to Earth yesterday, but will continue collecting data for eventual retrieval in the future. In January, something happened at the end of Ingenuity’s 72nd flight that damaged its rotor blades and it will never fly again, but everything else is working. Communications are relayed through the Perseverance rover, however, and it is moving out of range so the data Ingenuity collects will simply be stored onboard until a new rover or perhaps even human beings arrive to collect it.