What’s Happening in Space Policy April 24-30, 2022

What’s Happening in Space Policy April 24-30, 2022

By Marcia Smith | Posted: April 24, 2022 2:11 pm ET | Last Updated: April 24, 2022 6:06 pm ET

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of April 24-30, 2022 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

At the moment the plan is for the Axiom-1 crew to undock from the International Space Station this evening (Sunday) and splash down tomorrow off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico depending on weather conditions.

Crew of Axiom-1, L-R: Larry Connor (U.S.), Mark Pathy (Canada), Michael López-Alegria (U.S./Spain), Eytan Stibbe (Israel). Credit: Axiom Space

Their return to Earth has been delayed and delayed due to high winds in the splashdown area so the schedule keeps changing, but as of this morning that’s the plan. Axiom-1 is the first U.S.-sponsored private astronaut mission to the ISS and was supposed to be a 10-day mission of which eight were aboard ISS. The four private astronauts — a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom Space and three wealthy men from Canada, Israel and the U.S. who are paying for the expedition — are getting their money’s worth with an extra five days. They held their farewell news conference on Tuesday morning as scheduled and talked about how intensely busy they’d been conducting experiments, so hopefully these past few days have been more relaxed. NASA and Axiom Space will webcast hatch closing and undocking tonight. Axiom Space and SpaceX will webcast splashdown tomorrow beginning at 12:00 pm ET. Representatives of the two companies will hold a post-splashdown teleconference in mid-afternoon.

Crew-4, L-R: Bob Hines (NASA), Samantha Cristoforetti (ESA), Jessica Watkins (NASA), Kjell Lindgren (NASA). Credit: NASA

If they do undock and come home on that schedule, NASA’s next crew — Crew-4 — will launch on Wednesday and a pre-launch media teleconference will take place tomorrow (Monday). That’s tentative at this point, however. Keep checking our Calendar for any changes.

Crew-4 will replace Crew-3 after a five-day or so handover of operations. We haven’t seen a timeline for Crew-3’s return.

We also haven’t seen a timeline for when the Artemis I Space Launch System stack will start the trip back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. When the decision  was announced that they were going to roll back they said it might be on Tuesday. We’ll post any information we get as to when it will happen and if NASA will provide a webcast as they did when it rolled out.

Also, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev will make a second spacewalk this week. That’s on Thursday to continue activating the European Robotic Arm on the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module.

Back here on Earth, the House and Senate return from their Spring Break and get to work in earnest on the FY2023 budget request. Three space-related hearings are on tap.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS)

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the Department of Commerce’s budget priorities Wednesday morning with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. The hearing is about the Department overall, so how much attention will be paid to NOAA and especially the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) is unclear, but the Administration is requesting a significant increase for OSC (from $16 million to $87.7 million) to accelerate its efforts in space situational awareness (SSA) and getting the Open Access Data Repository (OADR) up and running. The topic is of great interest to the committee’s Ranking Member, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), sponsor of the Space Preservation and Conjunction Emergency (SPACE) Act, which is included in the Senate-passed version of what was known in the Senate as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA). The House passed a somewhat similar bill, the America COMPETES Act, and sent it to the Senate. The Senate recently passed it with an amendment that is essentially the text of the USICA and sent it back to the House. We’ll see what happens with the bill overall, which is mainly about U.S. competition with China and assistance to the U.S. semiconductor industry, but the Senate version does still include the SPACE Act. There’s a fair chance OSC/SSA/OADR will at least get mentioned at Wednesday’s hearing. Keep your acronym decrypter handy.

SSA will also be the subject of a House Science, Space, and Technology subcommittee hearing this week. Originally scheduled for March 30, the hearing will now take place Friday morning. Kevin O’Connell, who headed OSC during the Trump Administration and created the OADR initiative is one of the witnesses. He will be joined by Matthew Hejduk from the Aerospace Corporation, Moriba Jah from University of Texas-Austin, Andrew D’Uva from the Space Data Association, and Mariel Borowitz from Georgia Tech.

Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force

On the national security space front, the House Armed Services Committee has a hearing Wednesday morning (unfortunately overlapping with the Senate Commerce hearing) on the budget request for the Department of the Air Force. The Department of the Air Force oversees both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force. Witnesses are Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown, and Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond. Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement last week that the United States will not conduct destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests is almost certain to come up, along with the significant increase requested for the Space Force this year (from $17.5 billion to $24.5 billion).

There is so much else going on this week, all excellent events, but we can highlight just one more. On Thursday, the Washington Space Business Roundtable will hold a webinar on the new White House Strategy on In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing. It was released earlier this month and OSTP’s Ezinne Uzo-Okoro was scheduled to talk about it at the Space Symposium, but for whatever reason that session didn’t happen. She is OSTP’s Assistant Director of Space Policy and chaired the National Science and Technology Council working group that wrote the report. She’ll talk about it on Thursday along with Lindsay Millard from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and Bo Naasz, NASA Rendezvous and Capture System Capability Lead.

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.

Sunday, April 24

  • Axiom-1 Undocks from the ISS (webcast by NASA and Axiom Space)
    • 6:45 pm ET, hatch closure (coverage begins 6:30 pm ET)
    • 8:55 pm ET, undocking (coverage begins 8:30 pm ET)

Sunday-Wednesday, April 24-27

Monday, April 25

Monday-Wednesday, April 25-27

Monday-Thursday, April 25-28

Tuesday, April 26

Tuesday-Thursday, April 26-28

Tuesday-Friday, April 26-29

Wednesday, April 27

Wednesday-Thursday, April 27-28

Wednesday-Friday, April 27-29

Thursday, April 28

Friday, April 29

Last Updated: Apr 24, 2022 6:06 pm ET

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