What’s Happening in Space Policy August 17-24, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of August 17-24, 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

This week’s edition includes an extra day (Sunday, August 24) because NASA plans to launch SpaceX’s 33rd cargo mission to the ISS very early that morning before we publish our next issue. Later that day SpaceX is planning the 10th Starship test flight so we’re going to briefly mention that, too, but will have more next week.

There’s quite a bit going on before that, though.

The BIG EVENT is the 8th launch of the X-37B spaceplane for the U.S. Space Force (USSF). That’s scheduled for Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center. The time hasn’t been announced yet. Boeing built two X-37B Orbital Test Vehicles (OTVs). The USSF didn’t say which is being used for this mission, but shared a photo of it inside the Falcon 9 fairing.

X-37B missions are intriguing because they remain on-orbit for long periods of time doing mostly classified operations. The USSF sometimes provides a glimpse of what it’s doing, but much is left unsaid, adding to the mystery. The longest mission so far was the sixth flight — 908 days. The seventh was only 434 days, landing in March 2025. The USSF said that flight conducted aerobraking tests. This one, USSF-36 or OTV-8, includes “demonstrations of high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies and enhanced space navigation using the highest performing quantum inertial sensor in space.” The USSF’s press release explains why those are important, but not much detail.

Two ISS-related events are on tap. As we noted at the top, SpaceX’s 33rd cargo resupply mission is scheduled for launch early next Sunday morning (2:45 am ET) carrying scientific experiments, equipment, and supplies. The ISS National Lab will have a webinar on Tuesday to highlight some of the experiments. This Cargo Dragon is a little different because the trunk is outfitted with a special propulsion unit to reboost the space station. Engines on Russia’s Zvezda module and Progress cargo spacecraft have been doing that job since the beginning and will continue to do so, but recently NASA has been testing how Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus and SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon can help. NASA explains that Russia needs to replenish its fuel reserves because they’ll be needed starting around mid-2028 for attitude control when they let ISS begin a two-year natural decay process. Ultimately it will reach an altitude where thrusters on the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) being developed by SpaceX can direct the 420 Metric Ton facility into the Pacific Ocean.

That’s still a few years in the future. For now international crews continue to go up to the ISS and come back down. On August 9, Crew-10 returned after 5 months in space. The NASA and JAXA crew members will give a post-mission news conference on Wednesday afternoon.

NASA’s Exoplanets Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) will meet on Tuesday. Originally scheduled for June 3, the meeting was postponed because NASA wanted to wait until the new Administrator was confirmed, but on May 31 President Trump withdrew Jared Isaacman’s nomination and it’s not clear when anyone else will be nominated, much less confirmed. So ExoPAG is going ahead.

According to the agenda, John Wisniewski will give a NASA HQ update at 10:15 am ET including “internal changes, impact on the community.” He is the Program Scientist for SPHEREx, Program Officer for the Exoplanet Research Program, and Deputy Program Scientist for the Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) in the Astrophysics Division.  Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Acting Astrophysics Division Director on a 1-year detail from Goddard Space Flight Center, will provide an update on the Science Mission Directorate later in the day.  There’s been a lot of change in the astrophysics division as shown in a slide from Domagal-Goldman that Ars Technica’s Eric Berger posted on X on Friday, the day of the NSF-NASA-DOE Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC) meeting.

There’s been an incredible amount of turnover in the leadership of NASA’s Astrophysics division. Acting director Shawn Domagal-Goldman says more departures are likely. pic.twitter.com/gDX97kYnKz

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) August 15, 2025

Finding exoplanets that might support life ties into NASA’s astrobiology program in the Planetary Sciences Division.  An astrobiology update will take place Wednesday afternoon. The Save the Date notice says among other things they’ll provide information on the current state of the astrobiology program including opportunities included in ROSES-25, an overview of the program’s strategic goals, and the status of NASA DARES (Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy).  UPDATE: David Grinspoon, NASA’s Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy, confirms to SpacePolicyOnline.com that his position is being eliminated and his term appointment not renewed.  He’ll participate in Wednesday’s meeting.

One more event this week we’ll highlight is a National Academies’ workshop Wednesday morning on “Operationalizing Very Low Earth Orbit” or vLEO as it’s called. The area below 400 kilometers (250 miles) hasn’t been used much because spacecraft reenter pretty quickly unless they’re routinely reboosted like the International Space Station. But new propulsion technologies, smaller satellites and other technology advancements are making it more accessible.  The workshop will focus on how vLEO can be useful for “real-time surveillance, resilient communications, and rapid-response defense systems.”

Last but not least for today’s edition, as we mentioned, SpaceX is getting ready for the 10th Starship Integrated Flight Test (IFT-10) a week from today. It’s not until the evening — the launch window opens at 6:30 pm CENTRAL Time (7:30 pm Eastern) — but we wanted to get it on everyone’s radar. SpaceX published a recap of the most probable causes of what went wrong last time (IFT-9) with the booster and the ship. We’ll write more on that later.

Watch Starship’s tenth flight test → https://t.co/UIwbeGoo2B https://t.co/gbQv9akMO9

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 15, 2025

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.

Tuesday, August 19

• NASA Exoplanets Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG), virtual, 10:00 am ET-5:30 pm ET (pre-registration required)
• SpX-33 Research Roundup (NASA/ISSNL), virtual, 1:00 pm ET

Wednesday, August 20

• Workshop on Operationalizing Very Low Earth Orbit (National Academies), National Academy of Sciences building, 2101 Constitution Ave, NW, Washington, DC, 8:30 am-12:30 pm ET (livestreamed), pre-registration required for in-person or virtual participation
• MSBR Luncheon with Kuiper Government Solutions’ James “J.J.” Shaw, Martin’s Crosswinds, Greenbelt, MD, 11:30 am-1:00 pm ET
• NASA Astrobiology Update, virtual, 2:00-5:00 pm ET
• Crew-10 Post-Mission Briefing, JSC, 4:15 pm ET, watch on NASA’s YouTube channel

Thursday, August 21

• Launch of 8th X-37B Mission, KSC, time TBA
• Preview of NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO)-L1 Mission, virtual, 11:00 am-12:00 pm ET

Sunday, August 24

• Launch of SpX-33 Cargo Mission to ISS, CCSFS, 2:45 am ET, watch on SpaceX.com
• Launch of SpaceX Starship IFT-10, Starbase, TX, 7:30 pm ET

 

This article has been updated.