What’s Happening in Space Policy April 6-12, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of April 6-12, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

It’s another busy week with the Space Foundation’s Space Symposium, launch of a new ISS crew, the nomination hearing for Jared Isaacman to be NASA Administrator, launch of the first batch of Project Kuiper satellites, and Yuri’s Night, to name a few.

On Capitol Hill, House and Senate Republicans remain focused on reaching agreement on a budget resolution that is the first step towards “reconciliation” legislation, the vehicle through which they plan to implement President Trump’s agenda. They need to agree on an identical version. Yesterday (Saturday), the Senate passed the bill that cleared the House in February (H. Con. Res. 14), but they made changes so the House has to consider it again. Both chambers will recess at the end of this week (if not sooner) for a two-week spring break, so House leadership is eager to pass it this week. At the moment there are a number of Republicans who strongly disagree with the Senate’s changes, so whether it can pass or not is anyone’s guess.  We won’t get into the details. The topic is largely outside the scope of this space policy website except that the end result is likely to mean more money for defense and less for non-defense space activities.

What is of more direct interest on the Hill this week are two hearings, both on Wednesday.

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will hold the nomination hearing for Jared Isaacman to be the next NASA Administrator.  Isaacman is a tech billionaire who became well known to the space community through his private astronaut flights to Earth orbit — two so far, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn — and his close association with Elon Musk. Whether that association helps or hurts his confirmation will be interesting to watch.  Musk is NASA’s second biggest contractor (behind the California Institute of Technology that operates JPL).  Conflict of interest concerns that already have arisen because of SpaceX personnel assigned to work at NASA may be exacerbated with Isaacman at the helm. Musk also called one of the Senators who will vote on whether to confirm Isaacman, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a “traitor” because Kelly wants the United States to continue its support of Ukraine.  Other factors are at play, too, but Trump has been quite successful at getting his nominees confirmed.

The second Wednesday hearing is about national security space. The Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee will hold its annual Strategic Forces Posture Hearing with the Commanders of Strategic Command (Gen. Anthony Cotton), Space Command (Gen. Stephen  Whiting), and Northern Command (Gen. Gregory Guillot), along with John Hill, the acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy.  Cotton and Whiting recently appeared together before the Senate counterpart to this subcommittee, but there may be an even stronger focus on space this time with Hill and Guillot, who is dual-hatted as Commander of the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Like the Senate hearing, though, discussions in these open sessions don’t get into a lot of specificity. They save that for classified sessions afterwards.

Off the Hill, there are several “big events” starting with the massive Space Symposium in Colorado Springs sponsored by the Space Foundation. This is Space Symposium’s 40th year and it just keeps getting bigger and better. Companies and agencies, domestic and foreign, use the venue to make important announcements so keep your eyes peeled.  Preliminary events began this weekend, but the opening ceremony is tomorrow (Monday) night and the main sessions are Tuesday-Thursday.

Tuesday morning features Gen. Whiting and acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro and it’s off to the races from there. A paid virtual option is available for those who can’t make the trip. Times on the agenda are in Mountain Daylight Time (add two for Eastern). NASA issued a press release noting sessions that include Petro and other NASA leadership, but we’re told they will not be livestreamed by the agency. We hope they change their mind. If so, we’ll note it on our Calendar.

Earlier on Tuesday, a new crew will launch to the International Space Station on Soyuz MS-27 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.  Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Aleksey Zubritsky and NASA astronaut Jonny Kim will lift off at 1:47 am ET and dock just over three hours later at 5:03 am ET.  Hatch opening and welcome remarks are at 7:20 am ET. NASA+ will cover it all. The Soyuz MS-27 crew will stay for eight months rather than the traditional six. They’re replacing the Soyuz MS-26 crew: Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Don Pettit.

As always there are too many events to highlight here, but we will mention just two more.

On Wednesday, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) will launch the first batch of 27 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. This launch is on ULA’s tried-and-true Atlas V rocket. Attention has been focused recently on ULA’s new Vulcan, which was just certified to launch national security satellites, but there still are about 15 Atlas Vs waiting to launch.  In 2022, Amazon ordered nine Atlas V and 38 Vulcan launches from ULA, plus 18 on Europe’s Ariane 6 and 12 on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, to launch their broadband Internet satellite constellation of more than 3,200 satellites. Project Kuiper will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink and other similar systems in development around the world.  It’s taken Amazon quite some time to build the satellites, but they’re finally ready to go. Amazon refers to this launch as KA-01 for Kuiper Atlas 1.

The last event we’ll highlight is Saturday’s “Yuri’s Night,” the annual celebration of the first human being to orbit the Earth — Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.  He made one orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961, adding more fuel to the U.S.-Soviet “Space Race.” The United States responded by launching Alan Shepard on a suborbital mission three weeks later (May 5) and, three weeks after that (May 25), President John F. Kennedy called on the nation to commit to the goal of sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to Earth “before this decade is out.”  The United States won the race to the Moon, space cooperation with Russia ensued thereafter, and now Yuri’s night is celebrated everywhere.  (The first American to orbit the Earth like Gagarin was John Glenn on February 20, 1962.)

By happenstance, April 12 is also the anniversary of the first flight of the U.S. space shuttle, STS-1, so Americans often celebrate that as well. Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on April 12, 1981 with John Young and Bob Crippen. It was scheduled for April 10, but a computer glitch delayed it by two days and hence the two anniversaries are exactly 20 years apart.

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-Friday, April 6-11

• ISPRS Geospatial Week (GSW 2025), Dubai

Monday-Wednesday, April 7-9

• Sea-Air-Space Conference & Expoisition (Navy League), National Harbor, MD

Monday-Thursday, April 7-10

• 40th Space Symposium (Space Foundation), Colorado Springs, CO

Tuesday, April 8

• Launch and Docking of Soyuz MS-27 (watch on NASA+ beginning 12:45 am ET)
  • Launch, 1:47 am ET, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
  • Dock to ISS, 5:03 am ET, Earth orbit
  • Hatch Opening and Welcome Remarks, 7:20 am ET, Earth orbit

Tuesday-Thursday, April 8-10 EDT/Wednesday-Thursday April 9-10 JST

• Apophis T-4 Years Workshop, Tokyo, Japan/virtual (virtual attendees should note the time zone difference, Japan Standard Time is 13 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time)

Wednesday, April 9

• Senate Commerce Hearing on the Nomination of Jared Isaacman to be NASA Administrator, 253 Russell Senate Office Building, 10:00 am ET (webcast)
• First Launch of Operational Satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper (ULA), CCSFS, launch window opens 12:00 pm ET (webcast begins 20 minutes before liftoff)
• HASC Strategic Forces Subcommittee Posture Hearing, 2118 Rayburn House Office Building, 3:30 pm ET (webcast)

Wednesday-Thursday, April 9-10

• LSSW: Uncrewed Science with the Pressurized Rover, virtual, 7:00 pm ET

Thursday, April 10

• Conflict in Focus: Space and Data Domain Lessons from Russia-Ukraine (CSIS), virtual, 10:00-11:00 am ET

Friday, April 11

• Deepening the U.S.-Japan Space Security Relationship (CSIS), 1616 Rhode Island Ave, NW, Washington, DC/virtual, 1:00-4:00 pm ET

Saturday, April 12

• Yuri’s Night, global