What’s Happening in Space Policy February 22-28, 2026

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of February 22-28, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The Senate is scheduled to be in session all week; the House Monday-Wednesday.

During the Week

President Trump will deliver his annual State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night. Last year he reiterated his support for sending astronauts to Mars (building on his Inaugural Address) as well as for the Golden Dome missile defense shield with space-based components. We’ll see if he brings up civil or military space topics this time. Golden Dome remains an Administration priority. Enthusiasm for humans-to-Mars, in the near-term at least, seems to have waned with the focus returning to the Moon. Even passionate Mars advocate Elon Musk now sees value in lunar bases. The Artemis II launch that will send astronauts around the Moon for the first time since 1972 should be coming up soon, even though it’s been delayed, so perhaps it’ll get a mention. Weather permitting, NASA actually plans to roll the SLS/Orion stack back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs that very day, moving quickly with hope the launch date will slip only from March to April.

Tomorrow, the House will consider several bills under suspension of the rules, the expedited procedure for legislation expected to be non-controversial. Among them is the bipartisan ASCEND Act (H.R. 2600, as amended), co-sponsored by Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO) and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR). An ‘‘Accessing Satellite Capabilities to Enable New Discoveries Act” bill passed the House in the last Congress both individually and as part of the NASA authorization act, but neither cleared the Senate. That bill was co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas Kean (R-NJ) and Bonamici. H.R. 2600 requires NASA to “acquire and disseminate cost-effective and appropriate commercial Earth remote sensing satellite data and imagery.” A Senate version (S. 1437, Hickenlooper) passed the Senate in December. [UPDATE: Monday votes in the House and the Senate have been postponed because of the winter storm hitting the East Coast, making it difficult for members to return to Washington.)

NASA hasn’t announced a date yet, but earlier this month International Space Station (ISS) deputy program manager Dina Contella said SpaceX’s CRS-33 cargo spacecraft would undock at the end of February, which means sometime this week. [UPDATE: undocking is on Thursday.] SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon spacecraft not only deliver equipment and supplies to the ISS, but return them to Earth, the only one of the several cargo vehicles that resupply ISS capable of doing that. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus, JAXA’s HTV-X and Russia’s Progress are not designed to survive reentry. Instead they perform another valuable task — trash removal. The spacecraft burn up on reentry and the trash along with them. Cygnus and HTV-X also are sometimes used for various experiments after they depart the ISS and before they reenter. Cygnus-23 and HTV-X1 also are currently attached to the ISS (they berth rather than dock) and will depart in coming weeks. Stay tuned for news about that and the launch of Russia’s next Progress, the timing of which is dependent on repairs to Russia’s Site 31 launch pad that was damaged by the launch of Soyuz MS-28 last November. At the moment it’s scheduled for mid-late March.

Several conferences are on tap this week here and abroad. Among them is the Air and Space Force Association’s Warfare Symposium in Colorado. The theme this year is “Aligning Spacepower and Airpower to Win.”

The three-day conference kicks off tomorrow (Monday) afternoon with top officials from the Department of the Air Force: Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach. (The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force are both part of the Department of the Air Force.) The next two days are filled with more key government and industry officials on panels like “Battle-Hardening Commercial Space,” “International Partnerships in Space,” “Guardians in Space” (including former NASA astronauts Andrew Fuestel, now with Vast, and Brig. Gen. Nick Hague, who returned to military duty and is Assistant Deputy Chief of Space Operations), “What Satellite Imagery Can Tell Us About China’s Military Build Up,” “The Space Force We Need: Delivering a Combat Ready Force in an Evolving Operational Environment,” and many more.  Looks terrific. No indication of a virtual option, unfortunately.

Here in D.C., the Beyond Earth Institute holds its annual symposium Tuesday-Wednesday. Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA), a former NASA chief of staff and former CEO of Virgin Galactic, is the opening keynote speaker on Tuesday afternoon. It’ll be interesting to hear his take on how Congress views NASA and commercial space these days, including the Artemis program that relies so much on public-private partnerships. Not to mention the “space race” with China. One of the panels is “Moon First or Moon Forever? U.S. Strategy in the Face of China’s Lunar Ambitions.” Bhavya Lal, former NASA Associate Administrator for Technology, Policy, and Strategy will give a keynote, followed by a panel that includes Thomas Zurbuchen, former head of science at NASA (now at ETH Zürich in Switzerland).  Other panels include “Making the Right Decisions to Ensure a Thriving LEO  Economy,” “Shifting Opportunities for International Space Actors,” and much more.

AIAA’s ASCENDxTEXAS conference is in Houston Wednesday-Thursday with its own top notch set of speakers and the promise of an “AIAA Special Announcement” Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, will give a keynote address. NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Casey Swails and Space Operations Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Ken Bowersox will be at the conference along with prominent representatives of the commercial space sector. Ars Technica’s Eric Berger will moderate a panel with leaders of four companies planning commercial LEO space stations — Axiom, Vast, Blue Origin and Starlab — followed by a panel on “Dual Use Demand in LEO” that will focus in part on “how partnerships between innovators and the national security community can accelerate progress.” And that’s just for starters.

Among the interesting overseas conferences is the 11th National Space Policy Symposium sponsored by Japan’s Cabinet Office. It’s hybrid, so can be watched here in the States though the time zone difference can be a challenge (7:00 – 11:10 pm EST Thursday night), but it has a great list of participants from around the globe. Scott Pace from the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, Kai Uwe Schrogl from the European Space Agency, and Aarti Holla-Maini, Director of the U.N. Outer Space Affairs Office are among the keynote speakers. Japan’s Minister of State for Space Policy ONODA Kimi will provide pre-recorded remarks. KAZEKI Jun, Director-General of the Cabinet Office’s National Space Policy Secretariat (NSPS) will participate in a fireside chat on “The Future of Stability in Outer Space” together with Pace, Xavier Pasco from France’s Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, and the University of Tokyo’s SUZUKI Kazuto.

Lots more this week including a NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) virtual “Faster to Science” community briefing on Tuesday. Earth Science Division leadership will “communicate the scope, purpose, and value of changes to the division’s portfolio and processes, including efforts to streamline Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) to reduce the burden on proposers and shorten selection timelines.”  The announcement says NASA is making changes “to maximize scientific discovery, deliver more comprehensive modeling capability, and deliver higher-impact and higher-value scientific results faster to our user community.” There’ll be a moderated Q&A session after the briefing. Open to anyone who’s interested. The way the announcement is written it seems as though “Faster to Science” is a new catchphrase there in SMD.

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday afternoon are shown below. Check back throughout the week for others we learn about later and add to our Calendar or changes to these.

Monday-Wednesday, February 23-25

• AFA Warfare Symposium, Aurora, CO
• Geospatial Intelligence for Defence & Security (DGI), London

Monday-Thursday, February 23-26

• Ground Systems Architectures Workshop (GSAW), Los Angeles, CA (portions classified)

Tuesday, February 24

• NASA Rolls SLS/Orion Back to VAB (weather permitting), time TBA
• Earth Science “Faster to Science” Community Briefing (NASA/SMD), virtual, 2:00-3:00 pm ET
• 2026 State of the Union Address, U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC

Wednesday, February 25

• The Planetary Society: How We Used AI To Help Save NASA Science, virtual, 3:00 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, February 25-26

• ASCENDxTEXAS (AIAA), Houston, TX

Thursday, February 26

• GOVSATCOM Conference 2026, ECCL Luxembourg
• 11th National Space Policy Symposium on Space Sustainability (Japan Cabinet Office), 7:00-11:10 pm EST (February 27, 9:00-13:10 JST)