What’s Happening in Space Policy August 31-September 6, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of August 31-September 6, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

The week begins tomorrow (Monday) with a holiday, Labor Day, and Congress returns to work the next day.  They have a lot of work to do.

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: How Congress and NASA Can Thwart China in the Space Race.”  The committee’s website says another witness may be added, but as of today the witnesses are Allen Cutler from the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration (CDSE), Dave Cavossa from the Commercial Space Federation (CSF), and Jim Bridenstine, managing partner of The Artemis Group and former NASA Administrator.

The hearing isn’t only about the Artemis program, but it certainly will be a key focus. Committee chairman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a close ally of President Trump, but one area where he and the Trump Administration disagree is how to execute Artemis. The White House and Congress (both Republicans and Democrats) are completely aligned in their determination to get American astronauts back on the Moon before China puts taikonauts there. NASA is supposed to do that with Artemis III in mid-2027 using NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft. The debate is over what happens next.

The Trump Administration wants to terminate SLS and Orion and switch to commercial alternatives, as well as cancel the Gateway lunar space station being built by the U.S, Europe, Canada, Japan, and the UAE as a transfer point for astronauts between Earth and the lunar surface. They haven’t said when the next crew will go to the Moon. The only post-Artemis III event they talk about is putting a nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by 2030, not when astronauts will be there to use it.

Cruz and other members of Congress point out commercial alternatives to SLS/Orion don’t exist yet and want to keep the Artemis architecture as it is for now. Cruz added funding to the reconciliation bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, to continue SLS/Orion through Artemis V. It also fully funds Gateway.

Wednesday’s witnesses seem likely to support Cruz’s viewpoint. Bridenstine is now a lobbyist and CDSE and CSF are industry associations all with clients or members participating in Artemis.

The hearing is much broader than just getting back to the Moon, though.  It will “explore the strategic, economic, and scientific importance of American dominance in low Earth orbit (LEO), lunar operations, Mars exploration, and deep space missions” and “assess how U.S. policy and investments can foster America’s competitive edge in the face of growing challenges from adversarial nations, like China, whose rapid space advancements pose a direct threat to U.S. leadership in the domain.”  If and when the witness list changes, we’ll update our Calendar entry accordingly.

The Senate plans to take up the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (S. 2296) when they return on Tuesday.  It cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) in July. The NDAA is an authorization bill, not appropriations, so the funding recommendations are just that — recommendations — but the committee authorized about $24.3 billion for the U.S. Space Force. That’s far less than what USSF is expected to get, though. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is combining what’s in the reconciliation bill with the budget request, bringing the USSF’s total to about $40 billion. The House plans to take up their NDAA bill next week. The NDAA is the one piece of legislation that has passed Congress every year since the first in 1961 despite whatever political turmoil is going on.

Appropriations are another matter. In fact it’s September, so “shutdown showdown” season is once again upon us. As usual, none of the 12 appropriations bills has cleared Congress. The Defense bill passed the House on July 18 and cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 31, so that one is making some progress. The Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill that funds NASA was approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 17 and there was some hope it would be voted on by the full Senate before recess, but a dispute over a matter unrelated to NASA (location of a new FBI headquarters building, which is part of the Department of Justice and in the CJS bill) nixed that effort. The House Appropriations Committee was supposed to mark up the CJS bill the day before recess was scheduled to begin, but the House adjourned a day early so the markup was postponed although the committee released the report with details of its recommendations. The CJS bill is not on the committee’s agenda for this week, however.

A Continuing Resolution (CR) will certainly be needed to keep the government operating. The dynamics are rather different this year, though. In recent years, some Republicans have taken the position that a shutdown is fine with them and Democrats have had to find a path to avoid it. This year the White House says it wants a clean CR and it’s Democrats who aren’t sure they’ll go along because of rescissions being forced upon Congress by OMB. Some Republicans, including Senate Appropriations Committee chair Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), are angry, too. The topic of rescissions — including the “pocket rescissions” currently creating controversy — is outside the scope of this website other than to note that it is complicating the entire congressional appropriations process and putting funding for civil and national security space programs more at risk than usual.

Several other great events are on tap this week as well, including a discussion of “Space Law Across Borders” hosted by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and the Law School. Experts from the U.S., India, Japan and South Korea will discuss how approaches to space law vary, highlighting “the distinct legal traditions, strategic priorities, and international obligations that influence each country’s framework.” Gabriel Swiney from NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce will be there explaining the U.S. approach. Ranjana Kaul from Dua Associates in New Delhi, Shimpei Ishido, a partner at Nishimura & Asahi in Tokyo, and Nayoung Youn from South Korea’s Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) will share their countries’ perspectives.

We’ll also highlight NASA’s media telecon on Thursday to discuss two NASA science probes being readied for launch later this month: the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. They and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) will all launch together on a Falcon 9 rocket on September 23 headed to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point a million miles away towards the Sun.

IMAP will map the boundaries of the heliosphere — “a huge bubble created by the Sun’s wind that encapsulates our entire solar system” — and study how it interacts “with the local galactic neighborhood beyond.”  Carruthers will map the Earth’s outermost atmospheric layer, the exosphere. The probe was originally known as GLIDE, but renamed in honor of Dr. George Carruthers who invented the first ultraviolet camera and whose work provides the scientific foundation for this mission. (The press kit notes that a Carruthers’ far-ultraviolet camera was placed on the Moon by the Apollo 16 crew and was first to observe Earth’s geocorona. The camera is still there.)

Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and a heliophysicist, will discuss the missions along with Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, director of the Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office at NASA Goddard, David McComas, IMAP Principal Investigator from Princeton University, and Lara Waldrop, Carruthers Principal Investigator from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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.

Monday, September 1

• Labor Day (federal holiday)

Wednesday, September 3

• Senate Commerce Hearing on Thwarting China in the Space Race, 253 Russell Senate Office Building, 10:00 am ET (webcast)
• LSIC Workshop on Maintenance and Repair for Sustainable Lunar Surface Infrastructure, virtual, 10:25 am ET
• FAA Public Meeting on Draft EIS for Starship/Super Heavy Operations in Florida, virtual, 6:00-8:00 pm ET’

Thursday, September 4

• Space Law Across Borders: Comparative Frameworks in U.S, India, Japan and S. Korea (GW Space Policy Institute and Law School), George Washington University campus, Washington, DC, 10:00 am – 2:00 pm ET
• NASA Media Telecon on Upcoming IMAP and Carruthers Launch, virtual, 12:00 pm ET

Saturday-Sunday, September 6-7

• International Space Elevator Conference, virtual