What’s Happening in Space Policy April 13-19, 2025

What’s Happening in Space Policy April 13-19, 2025

By Marcia Smith | Posted: April 13, 2025 2:52 pm ET | Last Updated: April 16, 2025 6:29 pm ET

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of April 13-19, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess for two weeks, except for pro forma sessions.

During the Week

For many, the big event this week is tomorrow’s (Monday’s) Blue Origin New Shepard-31 (NS-31) launch of an all-female crew:  CBS journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Láuren Sanchez, Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, and Amanda Nguyễn, who will become the first Vietnamese woman in space. Blue Origin touts it as the first all-female space crew since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova made a solo flight in 1963. Many women have flown in space since, but as part of crews that included men.


The webcast will have an all-female ensemble, too. Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell will be joined by space journalist Kristin Fisher and sports reporter Charissa Thompson. The webcast begins at 7:00 am Central Time (8:00 am Eastern) for liftoff at 8:30 am Central (9:30 am Eastern). Bear in mind these launches are often delayed for minutes, hours, or even days due to weather or technical issues.

NASA astronaut Anna Fisher holding her daughter Kristin before her 1984 spaceflight.


Fun fact: Fisher has literally grown up in the space program. Her parents are NASA astronauts Anna Fisher (STS 51-A) and Bill Fisher (STS 51-I).  She was only 15 months old when her mother flew to space in 1984 — the first mother in space.

This will be New Shepard’s 31st flight overall, and the 11th to carry passengers since the first in 2021. That one carried Bezos himself and his brother Mark along with 82-year old Wally Funk, one of the “Mercury 13” and the oldest person to fly in space at the time (William Shatner surpassed her when he flew at 90), and Oliver Daemen, at 18 still the youngest.

It’s a 10 minute flight — off the launch pad, above the imaginery line that separates air and space at 100 kilometers (62 miles), and back down under parachute to the West Texas desert.

A completely different set of astronauts — the traditional kind who go into orbit, not just over the imaginery air/space dividing line for a couple of minutes — will return to Earth at the end of the week. Russian cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Don Pettit will undock from the International Space Station and land in Kazakhstan on Saturday, April 19, Eastern Daylight Time. It’ll be April 20 in Kazakhstan, which is notable because April 20 is Don Pettit’s 70th birthday.  He’s the oldest active NASA astronaut.  What a way to celebrate a birthday!

They’ve been on the ISS since September 11.  Ovchinin took over command of the ISS from Suni Williams. He will hand over command to JAXA’s Takuya Onishi, a member of NASA’s Crew-10, on Friday. All of it will be covered on NASA+.

It’s a comparatively quiet week otherwise.

Congress is off on a two-week spring break.  Before they left, the House did manage to pass the Senate version of the budget resolution (H. Con. Res. 14) we’ve been writing about. The vote was 216-214. All the Democrats who were present voted no. (There are two Democratic vacancies due to the deaths of Sylvester Turner-TX and Raúl Grijalva-AZ, and a third, Donald Norcross-NJ, is hospitalized). Two Republicans voted no (Thomas Massie-KY, Victoria Spartz-IN), two did not vote (Bob Onder-MO, David Valadao-CA), and all the others voted yes.

The ultra-conservative wing of the House Republican party is not happy with the Senate version because it doesn’t cut federal spending enough. The House bill called for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, while the Senate version is only $4 billion. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) were able to convince enough of them that it will all come out OK in the next step of the process — reconciliation. That’s the filibuster-proof legislation they are drafting to enact President Trump’s agenda of extending his 2017 tax cuts and increasing them, adding money for defense and border security, but reducing federal spending overall. That means cuts to almost everything else. The budget “passbacks” from the Office of Management and Budget that NASA and NOAA got on Thursday illustrate the possible impacts.

Congress returns on April 28. We haven’t seen any timeline for when the Senate Commerce Committee will vote on Jared Isaacman’s nomination to be NASA Administrator.

CSIS is having some interesting sessions on international cooperation in space. Last Friday’s in-person U.S.-Japan event was really good and there’s a webinar on cooperation with the Republic of Korea (ROK, which is South Korea) this Tuesday. Participants include HAN Minyoung, Director-General of the Climate Change, Energy, Environment, and Scientific Affairs Bureau, ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and John Lee, Deputy Administrator for Mission Directorates, Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA).  Joining them are Valda Vikmanis, Director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Space Affairs, and Karen Feldstein, NASA’s Associate Administrator for International and Interagency Relations.

On Thursday, NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has its quarterly telephone call to outbrief the public on their most recent findings and recommendations. Always interesting.

ASAP was created by Congress after the 1967 Apollo 1 tragedy and reports to both Congress and NASA, so it’s in a special category compared to NASA’s other advisory entities, many of which had their activities paused until they complied with the White House Executive Order (EO) eliminating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) from the government.

Here’s a quick update on the others. The NASA Advisory Council and its subcommittees are quiescent. They report to the NASA Administrator so perhaps NASA’s waiting until the new Administrator is in place. They also are “FACA” committees operating under the Federal Advisory Committee Act that have to meet specific requirements. NASA “AGs” — analysis/assessment groups — are community-based non-FACA entities that were paused and their websites taken offline.  Some websites have been restored and the groups given permission to move ahead. MEPAG (Mars) meets April 30-May 1 and OPAG (Outer Planets) from June 3-5.  ExMAG (Extraterrestrial Materials) had meetings scheduled for May and their website is back online, but no updates on the meetings. [Update, April 16:  LPI just posted the new dates: Sept. 15-17, 2025.] The websites for the other planetary science AGs are still “being reviewed in response to guidance given by NASA leadership,” to conform with the White House EO. Those are LEAG (Lunar), MAPSIT (Mapping and Planetary Spatial Infrastructure Team), MExAG (Mercury), OWWG (Ocean Worlds), SBAG (Small Bodies), and VEXAG (Venus). Astrophysics has three AGs: COPAG (Cosmic Origins), ExoPAG (Exoplanets), and PhysPAG (Physics of the Universe). All of their websites are online and ExoPAG has a virtual meeting scheduled for June 3.

Jacqueline Feldscher, Payload Space, will be on a panel on Thursday to discuss media perspectives on the satellite and space industry.

One more event this week we’ll highlight is a Thursday webinar sponsored by W2 communications, the Washington Space Business Roundtable (WSBR), and others with four media representatives sharing their insights on the satellite and space industry.  Jacqueline Feldscher from Payload Space, Rachel Jewett from Via Satellite, podcaster Maria Varmizas from N2K Space, and Mike Gruss from Space News will share “newsworthy moments, the reporters’ informed perspectives on the state of the overall market, what stories space reporters are covering, and shifts they are observing in the government space sector.”  Sounds interesting!

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are shown below. Check back throughout the week for others we learn about later and add to our Calendar or changes to these.

Monday, April 14

Monday-Wednesday, April 14-16

Tuesday, April 15

Tuesday-Friday, April 15-18

Wednesday, April 16

Thursday, April 17

Friday, April 18

Saturday, April 19 ET (April 20 local time in Kazakhstan)

Last Updated: Apr 16, 2025 6:29 pm ET

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