What’s Happening in Space Policy April 20-26, 2025

What’s Happening in Space Policy April 20-26, 2025

By Marcia Smith | Posted: April 20, 2025 4:30 pm ET | Last Updated: April 20, 2025 5:10 pm ET

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of April 20-26, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess again this week, except for pro forma sessions, as part of their spring break.

During the Week

This morning (Sunday), Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeted a post-landing photo of NASA astronaut Don Pettit after he was helped out of the Soyuz MS-26 capsule last night. It shows him smiling and giving a thumbs up, a welcome sight after the televised coverage scarcely showed him at all.


All three Soyuz crew members usually are shown reclining in their chairs chatting with colleagues after they’re extracted from the capsule, but cameras were on Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner this time. A very brief view of Pettit suggested he was weaker than his colleagues. NASA later said Pettit, who turned 70 today, was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him,” but offered no photos. Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut. He’s not the oldest person to fly in space, but is the oldest to spend such a long time there, seven months.

With Soyuz MS-26’s return, Expedition 73 is now underway on the U.S.-Russian-European-Japanese-Canadian International Space Station (ISS) continuing more than 24 years of permanent presence by international crews. The current seven-person complement is composed of three who arrived on Russia’s Soyuz MS-27 and four on NASA’s Crew-10 mission.

ISS Expedition 73 (L-R): Kirill Peskov (Roscosmos, Crew-10), Jonny Kim (NASA, Soyuz MS-27), Nichole Ayers (NASA, Crew-10), Sergey Ryzhikov (Roscomos, Soyuz MS-27), Anne McClain (NASA, Crew-10), Aleksey Zubritsky (Roscosmos, Soyuz MS-27), Takuya Onishi (JAXA, Crew-10).

NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers are getting ready to do a spacewalk on May 1. NASA will hold a news conference to explain what they’ll be doing on Thursday afternoon.

ISS is routinely resupplied by cargo spacecraft including SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus. The next launch, SpaceX-32, is scheduled for early tomorrow (Monday) morning. SpX-32 is filled with scientific experiments, food, and other supplies. Northrop Grumman was supposed to have launched their next Cygnus, NG-22, by now, but it was damaged during shipping to the launch site. NASA added more consumables to SpX-32 to compensate.

Last week, NASA’s Aerospace Space Advisory Panel warned that the ISS is entering its “riskiest period” as the root cause of persistent air leaks on the Russian segment remains “elusive.” They said NASA and their Russian counterparts would be meeting in Moscow this month to discuss the situation.  That may have been a reference to the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on the ISS that meets twice a year. NASA’s side is led by former astronaut Bob Cabana who chairs NASA’s International Space Station Advisory Committee. Cabana gave a public report last November about the Joint Commission’s meeting in September 2024 where the two sides could not reach agreement on the cause or potential risks of the leaks.  Cabana’s committee will give another outbrief on Thursday.

Fun fact: Cabana commanded the space shuttle mission, STS-88, that delivered the first U.S. module, Node 1, in 1998. At the time it was just Node 1 (now called Unity) and the Russian-built, U.S.-owned (NASA paid for it) Zarya module. Zarya, which means Dawn in Russia, is also known as the Functional Cargo Block (FGB).  How the station has grown since then!  (Cabana went on to become Director of Kennedy Space Center and then NASA Associate Administrator. He retired from NASA at the end of 2023.)

The U.S.-Russian-Canadian-Japanese-European International Space Station. Credit: NASA. The first ISS modules were launched in 1998 and the space station has been permanently occupied by international crews rotating on roughly 6-month schedules since November 2, 2000.

China is about to have a crew rotation of its own on their Tiangong-3 space station. The first Tiangong-3 module, Tianhe, was launched in 2021. Two more were added in 2022 and China began rotating 3-person crews in December 2022 when Shenzhou-15 replaced Shenzhou-14. Tiangong-3 is smaller than ISS (about 68 Metric Tons versus 420 MT), but similarly serves as a scientific laboratory including studying how humans adapt to long-durations in microgravity.

China’s Tiangong-3 space station as published in New Scientist, November 28, 2023.

The next crew, Shenzhou-20, is expected to launch this week to replace Shenzhou-19. China typically does not officially announce the crew members or launch date/time until about 24 hours before launch, but the first clue is when the rocket rolls to the launch pad. China’s state-owned Xinhua news agency announced that step four days ago. Expectations are that the launch will be this Thursday, April 24, which is China Space Day — the anniversary of the launch of their first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, on April 24, 1970. The China Space Conference in Shanghai coincides with the anniversary.

Focusing a bit more on Earth for a moment, don’t forget that Tuesday is Earth Day. Celebrated every year since 1970, the Earth Day website traces its origins to a January 1969 oil spill that galvanized Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson to initiate a series of campus teach-ins about the environment. Many in the space community, however, attribute the public’s growing awareness of Earth’s vulnerability in that era to the Earthrise photo taken a month earlier by Bill Anders during the December 1968 Apollo 8 mission, the first time humans orbited the Moon.

Earthrise. Image captured by NASA astronaut Bill Anders as the Apollo 8 spacecraft came from behind the Moon and they saw Earth from a new perspective.  December 24, 1968. Credit: NASA

However it started, this is Earth Day’s 55th anniversary and an especially good time to give our planet a hug. The theme this year is “Our Power, Our Planet.”  The Earth Day website has a global map showing where various events are taking place. NASA usually participates in many Earth Day activities, but we haven’t seen any notices this year.  Considering all the tumult in Washington that’s not altogether surprising, but perhaps they’ll issue something tomorrow or Tuesday.

One Earth Day event we know about is Rick Tumlinson’s webinar “EarthSpace2025.” Tumlinson founded the EarthLight Foundation and according to its website “EarthLighters believe it is our job and duty to not only preserve life down here, but to expand the domain of her life to places now dead.” He will moderate a discussion with Frank White, author of The Overview Effect, Morgan Goodwin, Planetary Sunshade Foundation, and Ryan Olliges, Elevated Materials, around the question: “What if space is the key to saving Earth?”  He cautions that the number of Zoom “seats” is limited, so be sure to register in advance.

SWF and CSIS will hold a joint webinar on Friday to discuss their complementary counterspace reports. SWF’s was issued earlier this month.

One more event we’ll highlight is Friday’s webinar on counterspace trends.  The Secure World Foundation (SWF) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) each author annual reports on global counterspace capabilities and trends. The reports are complementary and the two groups hold a joint meeting each year to summarize their latest observations and conclusions.  SWF’s report, Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment, was issued earlier this month. CSIS’s presumably will be available by the time of this webinar.

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 21

Monday-Thursday, April 21-24

Tuesday, April 22

Wednesday, April 23

Wednesday-Thursday, April 23-24

Wednesday-Saturday (Beijing Time), April 23-26

Thursday, April 24

Friday, April 25

Last Updated: Apr 20, 2025 5:10 pm ET

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