Space Policy Events for the Week of September 9-13, 2013
The following activities may be of interest in the week ahead. Congress returns to work this week with a full plate of issues to resolve.
During the Week
Syria tops the issues Congress will grapple with as it returns to work after its summer recess, but passing a Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government after September 30 is also on the docket. The content of the CR is the subject of many rumors starting with how long it will last (weeks or months) and whether it will hold agencies to their FY2013 funding levels, the funding levels in the House-passed budget resolution (which are lower), the funding levels in the Senate-passed budget resolution (which are higher), or something in between. Congress often compromises on the “something in between” level. We may get a hint later this week; some reports suggest that the House could take up a CR on Thursday.
NASA still has not released its FY2013 operating plan, which details how the money it was allocated for FY2013 as adjusted for the sequester and two rescissions will be distributed among its various programs, projects and activities. SpacePolicyOnline.com was able to obtain top level numbers from NASA last week and we updated our FY2013 and FY2014 budget fact sheets accordingly, but the next tier of detail is available only for planetary science based on a presentation by planetary science division director Jim Green to the NRC’s Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science (CAPS) a few days ago (which we also added to our fact sheets). We continue to try to get NASA to release the more detailed figures for other parts of the Science Mission Directorate and the rest of NASA.
In other matters, three International Space Station crew members are set to return home on Tuesday night; SpaceX is gearing up for its first launch of a new version of the Falcon 9 rocket — v1.1 — from Vandenberg Air Force Base, though it has not announced the date so it may or may not occur this week (so it’s not listed below); and there are meetings and conferences from Washington, D.C. to Wailea, Hawaii as shown below.
Tuesday, September 10
- House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Satellite TV, 2141 Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am ET
- Soyuz TMA-08M landing with three ISS crew members, 10:58 pm ET (8:58 am September 11 local time at the landing site in Kazakhstan)
Tuesday-Thursday, September 10-12
- AIAA Space 2013 conference, San Diego, CA
Tuesday-Friday, September 10-13
- AMOS Space Surveillance Conference, Wailea, HI
Thursday, September 12
- The Longevity of Human Civilization, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, room 119, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm ET
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