What’s Happening in Space Policy August 10-16, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of August 10-16, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess until September 2 except for pro forma sessions.

During the Week

The big event this week is the 39th annual Small Satellite Conference, SmallSat, taking place for the first time somewhere other than Utah State University in Logan, Utah, it’s home since the first conference in 1987. SmallSat’s founder, Frank Redd, was right all those years ago that smallsats would revolutionize the satellite industry and now that it has they need a bigger venue. This year it’s at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City.

Pre-conference events are taking place today, but the meeting officially begins tomorrow (Monday) with NASA’s Nicky Fox as the keynote speaker. Fox heads the Science Mission Directorate. While many NASA science missions necessarily involve large, complex satellites for studying Earth and the cosmos, as smallsats become more and more capable, SMD is embracing them for a variety of missions, albeit with mixed success.

NASA just abandoned attempts to restore communications with one of their smallsats, Lunar Trailblazer, after losing contact the day after launch. It was intended to search for water on the Moon’s surface from lunar orbit. And one of two TRACERS magnetic reconnection satellites launched on July 23 is experiencing a power subsystem problem. But Fox is sure to talk about successes, too, like MarCO-A and MarCO-B, the first cubesats sent to Mars back in 2018. Two more Mars cubesats called ESCAPADE are awaiting launch right now after being bumped off Psyche when it was delayed for a year, and again from Blue Origin’s first New Glenn mission because of delays there. At the moment they’re scheduled to go on Blue Origin’s second New Glenn later this year.

That’s just the beginning of what surely will be another amazing SmallSat conference that includes many, many side events. About 4,000 people from 1,300 organizations and 45 countries are expected.

On the launch front, the big event is ULA’s first Vulcan mission for the U.S. Space Force. USSF-106 is scheduled for liftoff on Tuesday evening at 7:59 pm ET with a one-hour launch window. ULA President Tory Bruno told reporters last week this is exactly the type of challenging mission Vulcan Centaur was designed for with a very long burn to directly inject the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 into geosynchronous orbit.  Weather is 75 percent “go” at the moment.

The launch of a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket carrying the U.S. Space Force (USSF)-106 mission for the United States Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) is planned for Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025, from Space Launch Complex (SLC) 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station,… pic.twitter.com/OkWwEAxSUz

— ULA (@ulalaunch) August 5, 2025

Bruno will participate in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) tomorrow at 1:30 pm ET where he will “dive into Vulcan, ULA’s first national security space mission on a Vulcan rocket, the future of space launch, and anything else on your mind.”

It’s summer and the list of other events this week is pretty short, but still lots of good stuff. We’re especially looking forward to Space News’ webinar on Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) on Thursday.

Whether it’s called SBSP, Satellite Solar Power Stations (SSPS), or Solar Power Satellites (SPS), the idea of putting satellites with VERY large solar arrays in orbit to collect sunlight and beaming the energy down to receiving antennas on Earth has been around since 1968 when Peter Glaser published his seminal “Power from the Sun” in Science. That was followed by a feasibility study he did for NASA in 1974. NASA and the Department of Energy followed with their own study in the late 1970s as did the congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1981 that basically concluded the idea was ahead of its time.

That did not deter its supporters. In the late 1990s, John Mankins, who’s one of the panelists on Thursday, led a “Fresh Look at Space Solar Power” at NASA and after retiring wrote The Case for Space Solar Power in 2014. Jim Vedda and Karen Jones (another panelist on Thursday) wrote a report for the Aerospace Corporation in 2020 after the sixth X-37B spaceplane mission carried an experimental solar power module. The report included a summary of what other countries are doing and pointed out the United States needs to decide whether to lead in this area, collaborate with others, or “pass up this opportunity.”

NASA’s (now dissolved) Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy took a new look last year focused on whether SPS is an option to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, ending with a rather pessimistic assessment. The third panelist on Thursday, Martin Soltau, clearly disagrees. He’s co-CEO of Space Solar, a U.K. company whose “single corporate priority” is developing SBSP to “support the transition to Net Zero and provide global energy security, delivering a safe and secure world where clean, affordable energy is available to all.”  Net Zero wasn’t a rallying cry in 1968, but otherwise it sounds just like Peter Glaser’s vision.

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-Wednesday, August 10-13

• 39th Small Satellite Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah

Tuesday, August 12

• Lunar Applied Sciences Panel for the Key Non-Polar Destinations Study (Natl Acad), Beckman Center, Irvine, CA, 11:55 am-8:15 pm ET (livestreamed)
• ULA Launch of USSF-106, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, FL, 1-hour launch window opens 7:59 pm ET

Thursday, August 14

• Space Based Solar Power (Space News), virtual, 1:00-2:00 pm ET

Friday, August 15

• Interagency Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), virtual, 10:00 am-6:00 pm ET