What’s Happening in Space Policy April 21-27, 2024

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.

During the Week

The House and Senate both were supposed to be in recess this week, but delays in House consideration of the national security supplemental disrupted those plans. The House finally adjourned on Saturday after passing four separate bills to provide funding for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, and to force a sale of TikTok and seize frozen Russian assets to pay for rebuilding Ukraine. They are being combined into one (H.R. 815) for consideration by the Senate. Absent unanimous consent, Senate procedures require certain time periods to elapse before a bill gets to a final vote. The Senate will meet on Tuesday to complete one of those steps. Its schedule thereafter is uncertain. It has been debating the FAA Reauthorization bill, so could make more progress on that.

But there are no space-related hearings scheduled. Thank goodness, because it is a really, really busy week already. Our calendar tells the tale. We count 31 events as of now (Sunday morning).

 

We’re going to highlight just four of those lest this missive get too long. All the events are listed below and the first 20 are on our home page. The full list (shown above), which is clickable, is on our calendar of events page.

First, China will launch their next space station crew on Thursday. It’s the beginning of another crew rotation. The Shenzhou-18 crew will trade places with the three-man Shenzhou-17 crew on Tiangong-3, also called the China Space Station (CSS). As usual, China has not officially announced the launch date or time, or the crew. They usually do that about 24 hours before launch, but the April 25 launch date is widely reported and Bob Christy of @OrbitalFocus calculates the launch time as about 12:58 UTC, which is 8:58 am EDT.

Launch Advisory

Shenzhou 18
Apr 25, 12:58 UTC
CZ 2F
Jiuquan

Crew of three for space station duty rotation

Time currently computes as 12:58:57 UTC but may move by a few seconds as CSS orbit is trimmed

— Orbital Focus (@OrbitalFocus) April 17, 2024

China’s Xinhua news agency has published photos of the rocket and spacecraft being transferred to the launch pad, they just haven’t made an official announcement. They say only it will be launched “at an appropriate time in the near future.”

China celebrates its National Day of Spaceflight on April 24, the anniversary of the launch of their first satellite, Dong Fang Hong-1 (The East is Red), on April 24, 1970. The China Space Conference takes place during the week in Wuhan.

Thursday is also the day that Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) crew arrives at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for their May 6 launch to the International Space Station. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will touch down at KSC about 1:00 pm ET and be welcomed by KSC officials and the media. NASA TV will cover it. A media telecon will take place later in the day following the Flight Test Readiness Review. It’s scheduled for 6:00 pm ET, but that could change if they need longer to complete the review. Listen on NASA Live.

This test flight has been a long time coming. Boeing and SpaceX started their commercial crew programs at the same time in 2014, but SpaceX’s test flight, Demo-2, lifted off four years ago and SpaceX now routinely launches Crew Dragon both for NASA and private customers. NASA wanted two commercial crew providers to provide redundancy and ensure competition. If all goes well with Starliner CFT, they will finally have it.

On a totally different note, the third event we’ll highlight is the Aerospace Industries Association’s webinar on the national security space budget request. That’s on Wednesday afternoon. AIA’s companion webinar on the civil space budget request a couple of weeks ago was excellent so we have high expectations for this one, too. It’s not just budget numbers. Todd Harrison, formerly with CSIS and now with American Enterprise Institute, and the Aerospace Corporation’s Sam Wilson will provide their analysis and perspective on what it all means. AIA’s Steve Jordan Tomaszewski is the moderator.

There are SO MANY other really interesting meetings this week. We wish we could highlight them all, but we’ll stop with this last one. NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) is meeting Wednesday-Friday here in D.C. and there’s a joint workshop the prior two days between MEPAG and the Extraterrestrial Materials Program Assessment Group (ExMAG). Both meetings will discuss Mars Sample Return, which should be especially interesting following NASA’s announcement last week that they are seeking innovative ideas on how to get that done in a timely, affordable manner. There’s a lot of concern in the planetary science community, including those who want to do other Mars science, that MSR not swallow the entire planetary science budget. Yet there’s substantial agreement that it’s really important to bring back the samples being collected right now by the Perseverance rover. Concerns about MSR’s cost have been around for a long time, but the budget caps set by last year’s Fiscal Responsibility Act make the choices even more difficult. Both meetings have a virtual option.

Those and the many 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.

Sunday-Tuesday, April 21-23

• Business of Space Conference 2024 (Univ of Alabama Huntsville), Huntsville, AL

Monday, April 22

• Earth Day, global

Monday-Tuesday, April 22-23

• Apophis T-5 Conference: Knowledge Opportunities for the Science of Planetary Defense, ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
• MEPAG/ExMAG Joint Workshop on Connecting Community Science Hypotheses to Mars Sample Science, University of Arizona DC Center for Outreach and Collaboration, 1301 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, Washington, DC

Monday-Thursday, April 22-25

• International Planetary Protection Week (COSPAR), London, UK/online

Monday-Friday, April 22-26 (continued from last week)

• Legal Subcommittee of the U.N. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), Vienna, Austria (webcast)

Tuesday, April 23

• FAA Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), FAA HQ, Washington, DC, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm ET (livestreamed)
• Lockheed Martin 1Q2024 Financial Results Telecon, virtual, 11:00 am ET
• Space Industry for Space Strategy (Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center), 1030 15th St., NW, Washington, DC, 4:00-5:00 pm ET (webcast)

Tuesday-Thursday, April 23-25

• 2024 Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) Spring Meeting, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, MD/online
• Space Power Workshop (Aerospace Corp), Torrance Marriott Redondo Beach, Torrance, CA

Tuesday-Friday, April 23-26

• China Space Conference, Wuhan, China

Wednesday, April 24

• Air & Space Warfighters in Action: Col. Nicole Petrucci (AFA), virtual, 10:00-11:00 am ET
• Boeing 1Q2024 Financial Results Telecon, virtual, 10:30 am ET
• National Security Space Budget (AIA), virtual, 2:00 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, April 24-25

• National Space-Based PNT Advisory Board, Colorado Springs, CO

Wednesday-Friday, April 24-26

• Hera Community Meeting (in conjunction with the Apophis T-5 conference), ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
• NASA Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), University of Arizona DC Center for Outreach and Collaboration, 1301 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, Washington, DC
• 2024 Space For Islands Conference, Maldives

Thursday, April 25

• Launch of China’s Shenzhou-18 Crew to the Tiangong-3 Space Station, Jiuquan, China, 8:58 am EDT?
• Northrop Grumman 1Q2024 Financial Results Telecon, virtual, 9:00 am ET
• Russian Spacewalk at ISS, Earth orbit, 10:55 am ET (NASA TV begins 10:30 am ET)
• Starliner CFT Crew Arrives at Kennedy Space Center, KSC, 1:00 pm ET (NASA TV)
• What Will It Take To Build Communities in Space (Beyond Earth Institute), virtual, 1:00-2:30 pm ET
• ISU-DC Space Café with JAXA Washington Office Director Masami Onoda, 1201 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 6:00-8:00 pm ET
• Starliner CFT Flight Test Readiness Review Media Telecon, virtual, ~6:00 pm ET (time subject to change), NASA Live

Thursday-Friday, April 25-26

• NASA Biological & Physical Sciences Advisory Committee, public participation virtual only
• NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee (NAC-HEO), public participation virtual only
• National Academies’ Committee on Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars, Keck Center, 500 5th St., NW, Washington, DC

Friday, April 26

• Life on Earth and Beyond, with Thomas Zurbuchen and Didier Queloz, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 17:00 CEST (11:00 am EDT) Livestreamed
• SpaceX CRS-30 Cargo Ship Undocks from ISS, Earth orbit, 1:05 pm ET (NASA+ coverage begins 12:45 pm ET)