What’s Happening in Space Policy February 4-10, 2024

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of February 4-10, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them.  The Senate and House are in session for at least part of this week.

During the Week

It’s another quiet week on Capitol Hill in terms of space. The House is in session only for the first part of the week because the annual Democratic retreat is Thursday and Friday. Both chambers have weighty issues to debate, but nothing directly space-related. We don’t have any news about appropriations. Most of the chatter is about the national security supplemental that may or may not include funding for Ukraine, Israel and the U.S. border, rather than the FY2024 appropriations bills. The Senate will begin a two-week recess next week. The House will be in recess the second of those two weeks. March 1 and March 8 aren’t that far away. The clock definitely is ticking.

Elsewhere, the week has started already with NASA’s science briefing this morning for the launch of the PACE — Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) — earth observation satellite. A pre-launch briefing is set for tomorrow (Monday) morning. The launch itself is very early Tuesday morning (1:33 am ET). The weather forecast isn’t all that great though, only 40 percent “go” at the moment.

NASA Earth Science Division Director Karen St. Germain said at this morning’s briefing that PACE will “profoundly advance our understanding about how our oceans work and how they are related to the broader Earth system and the changing climate.” Coupled with data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite launched last year, PACE will “usher in a golden era in ocean science … and teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb [the James Webb Space Telescope] is teaching us about the cosmos.”

Tuesday may also be the day the Axiom-3 crew gets to come home. They were supposed to undock on Friday, but bad weather in the splashdown zones near Florida has postponed it several times. Tuesday is the current target. The four men are getting a few extra days added to the 14 they were scheduled to spend on the International Space Station conducting experiments and enjoying life in microgravity.

This is Axiom Space’s third private astronaut mission and the second to be commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegria. He holds dual citizenship in Spain and the United States and his three companions are from Italy, Sweden, and Türkiye so Axiom calls this the first all-European crew. The passengers are all military pilots for their governments. The governments are paying Axiom for the ride to and from ISS on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, so it is an arrangement made through the private sector and they are called “private” astronauts or “commercial” astronauts even though they are government employees.  We’ll be tracking their return and will post any information we get on our Calendar.

The three-day (Tuesday-Thursday) Smallsat Symposium in Mountain View, CA has an impressive set of speakers and panels. Among the panels on Tuesday is one moderated by Satellite Industry Association President Tom Stroup that will recap what happened at the recent ITU World Radio Conference (WRC-23) that could affect the smallsat industry. Stroup will be joined by Whitney Lohmeyer, Chief Technologist of the FCC’s Space Bureau, Jorge Ciccorossi, Acting Head of the ITU’s Space Systems Coordination Division, George John from Hogan Lovells, and Katherine Gizinski from River Advisers. Richard DalBello, Director of the Office of Space Commerce at the Department of Commerce is the keynote speaker that day. That’s just a quick sampling of what’s on the agenda. Looks terrific. A virtual option is available for registered attendees.

NASA is holding what sounds like an interesting workshop on Wednesday morning at NASA HQ in Washington, DC.  They’re asking for innovative ideas for a low-cost mission to Apophis, the relatively sizeable (1,100-foot/340-meter diameter) asteroid that will come close to (but not hit) Earth on April 13, 2029. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, the one that dropped off samples of the asteroid Bennu last year, is still in space and will rendezvous with Apophis after it passes Earth, but scientists also want to collect data before it gets here. That way they can determine how Apophis was affected by the close encounter and add to the asteroid knowledge base that could really help if something that size is on a collision course in the future. The question is whether there may be an innovative, inexpensive mission that could be shoehorned into the constrained budgets that lie ahead.  As of today, NASA has not said if the first part of the workshop that provides an overview of the problem will be livestreamed. We’ll post whatever we learn in our Calendar item.

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, February 5

• NASA Pre-Launch Briefing for PACE, KSC/virtual, 9:00 am ET
• Change of Command Ceremony for U.S. Northern Command/NORAD, Colorado Springs, CO, 12:00 pm ET (livestreamed)

Monday-Friday, February 5-9 (continued from last week)

• Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the U.N. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Vienna, Austria (webcast)

Tuesday, February 6

• Launch of NASA’s PACE Earth Observation Satellite, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, FL, 1:33 am ET (NASA TV begins 12:45 am ET)
• Tentative Axiom-3 Undocking from ISS and Return to Earth, details TBD (weather dependent)
• Space Situational Awareness Workshop (USGIF), Springfield, VA, 8:00 am-4:00 pm ET (final session is classified)
• Apophis 2029 Innovation Listening Workshop, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, overview session 9:00-11:00 am ET

Tuesday-Thursday, February 6-8

• NASA Mercury Exploration Assessment Group (MExAG), virtual
• Smallsat Symposium 2024, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

Thursday, February 8

• AIAA Policy Breakfast on U.S. Leadership in Cislunar Space, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1615 H St., NW, Washington, DC, 8:00 am ET

Friday, February 9

• Unlocking the Solar System with Space Nuclear Technology (Beyond Earth Institute), virtual, 2:00-3:30 pm ET