What’s Happening in Space Policy January 5-12, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of January 5-12, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

On Thursday, January 9, federal offices will be closed in tribute to Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, who died on December 29 at the age of 100.

The 119th Congress, which got underway on Friday, will meet in Joint Session at the U.S. Capitol tomorrow (Monday) to certify the Electoral College results, snowstorm notwithstanding. [UPDATE: the federal government in the D.C. region will closed tomorrow, January 6, due to the snowstorm. Congress will still meet for the Electoral Count as far as we know.) Then Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda from the afternoon of January 7 until the morning of January 9 when he will be taken to Washington National Cathedral for a state funeral.

Carter was President from 1977-1981, a critical period in the space program. The space shuttle program encountered schedule delays and cost overruns leaving the United States with no ability to launch astronauts for six years while the Soviet Union made impressive advances with a series of space stations. At the same time, they developed a new antisatellite (ASAT) weapon that the U.S. declared operational in 1977. Carter became the first President to try to negotiate an ASAT treaty, but the effort failed in part because the Soviets claimed the space shuttle could be used as an ASAT and wanted it included. Carter ended up directing DOD to develop a U.S. ASAT system — the air-launched F-15 Miniature Homing Device. We’ll have more on Carter’s influence on the space program later.

Off the Hill, this could be an exciting week with both the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and the seventh Integrated Flight Test (IFT-7) of SpaceX’s Starship.

Blue Origin continues its silence about when they’ll attempt the launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, FL. The only clues are from astute reporters and other observers in Florida who share what they see on social media, and the FAA’s operations plan advisory website that alerts airspace users of upcoming launches. As of January 5 at 10:00 am ET, the FAA shows the primary launch date for New Glenn on January 8 between 0600Z and 0945Z (Z stands for Zulu and is the same as GMT or UTC), which is 1:00 am-4:45 am Eastern Standard Time. It’s simply information the FAA has been given, not a launch announcement, and often changes.

The backup date, interestingly, is two days later (instead of one as in previous listings) on January 10, the same day SpaceX is targeting for Starship IFT-7 from Starbase in Boca Chica, TX.

SpaceX hasn’t officially announced a launch date either and it’s not even on the FAA’s website, but Elon Musk tweeted that they plan to launch that day.

SpaceX is providing details about changes they’ve made and what they’ll try to accomplish this time. The Starship upper stage has a block of upgrades including a 25 percent increase in propellant volume and a complete redesign of the avionics. The Super Heavy first stage will reuse one of the Raptor engines from IFT-5.  The flight includes the first payload deployments — 10 Starlink simulators — although they will be on the same suborbital trajectory as the upper stage so will similarly splash down in the Indian Ocean. There are changes to the launch tower, too, as they attempt another catch. “Hardware upgrades to the launch and catch tower will increase reliability for booster catch, including protections to the sensors on the tower chopsticks that were damaged at launch and resulted in the booster offshore divert on Starship’s previous flight test.”

SpaceX is requesting permission to increase the launch and landing cadence at Starbase, which requires an environmental review. The FAA had scheduled five public meetings to provide input back in August, but they were delayed when questions arose about SpaceX’s compliance with existing environmental regulations. They were rescheduled for January 7 and 9 for the in-person meetings (two each day) and January 13 for the virtual meeting, but now the government will be closed on January 9 so those are canceled. Now there are two in-person meetings on January 7 (1:00-3:00 pm and 5:30-7:30 pm Central Time) and one virtual meeting on January 13 (5:30-7:30 pm Central Time).

Here in D.C., NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, the head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, will hold a media telecon on Tuesday to provide an update on the Mars Sample Return program.  An independent group has been assessing proposals for how to accomplish the sample return mission more affordably and sooner than the existing plan, whose anticipated cost mushroomed to $11 billion. MIT’s Maria Zuber is chairing an impressive group of scientists and engineers, supported by a NASA Analysis Team, to look at proposals from 11 companies and organizations (including JPL, which manages the existing program) to come up with a path forward. The NASA press release doesn’t indicate that Zuber or anyone else from the review team will be on the telecon.

Elsewhere, AIAA’s annual week-long SciTech Forum is taking place in Orlando, FL starting tomorrow. As we wrote last week, JPL Director Laurie Leshin kicks it off with a keynote that morning. Other plenary sessions on subsequent days feature Kristen Baldwin, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering; Bronson Messer II, Director of Science at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Lab; a panel on AI and Autonomy with representatives from Lockheed Martin, MIT, and Stanford; and a panel on Future of Innovation with representatives from Honeywell, Astroscale US, and Electra.

NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free speaks on Tuesday on “NASA’s Strategy to Define the Next Era of Continuous Human Presence in Low Earth Orbit.”  NASA recently released its new LEO Microgravity Strategy confirming “continuous human presence” means “continuous heartbeat” not “continuous capability.”

Overseas, on Thursday ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher will hold the ESA DG Annual Press Briefing to discuss what’s coming up in 2025. It will be livestreamed on ESA TV. It’s at 10:00 Central European Time, which is pretty early here in the States (4:00 am Eastern), but ESA does a good job of posting a replay within a few hours.

Two major conferences — the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting and the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Winter Meeting — begin on Sunday, January 12, so we’re including them in this edition. AMS is in New Orleans.  AAS is at the Gaylord in National Harbor, MD and NASA’s three astrophysics Program Analysis Groups – ExoPAG, COPAG and PhysPAG — will meet next weekend on Saturday and/or Sunday in conjunction with the conference. The PAGs’ joint meeting is Sunday afternoon.

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-Thursday, January 5-9

• Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC

Monday-Friday, January 6-10

• AIAA SciTech Forum, Hyatt Regency Orlando, Orlando, FL

Tuesday, January 7

• NASA Media Telecon with Mars Sample Return Program Update, virtual, 1:00 pm ET (audio only on NASA Live)
• Two FAA Public Meetings on Increasing SpaceX Launch/Landing Cadence at Boca Chica, TX, Texas Southmost College, Brownsville, TX,
  • 1:00-3:00 pm CENTRAL Time
  • 5:30-7:30 pm CENTRAL Time

Tuesday-Thursday, January 7-9

• NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL/virtual

Wednesday, January 8

• PLACEHOLDER Blue Origin Inaugural Launch of New Glenn?
• NASA Leadership Earth-to-Space Call with ISS Astronauts, virtual, 1:25 pm ET

Thursday, January 9

• ESA Director General’s Annual Press Briefing, ESA HQ, Paris, FR, 10:00 CET (4:00 am EST), watch on ESA TV
• U.S. Government Offices Closed in Tribute to Late President Jimmy Carter

Friday, January 10

• NASA/NOAA Announce 2024 Global Temperatures, Climate Conditions, virtual, 12:00 pm ET
• Starship Integrated Flight Test-7 (IFT-7), Boca Chica, TX, 4:00-5:37 pm CENTRAL Time (5:00-6:37 pm Eastern) — not officially announced by SpaceX, but confirmed by Musk post on X

Saturday-Sunday, January 11-12

• NASA Exoplanets Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG), National Harbor, MD/virtual (in conjunction with the AAS Winter Meeting, part of the meeting is joint with other PAGs)

Sunday, January 12

• NASA Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group (PhysPAG), National Harbor, MD (in conjunction with the AAS Winter Meeting), 9:00 am-6:00 pm ET (part of the meeting is joint with other PAGs)
• NASA Cosmic Origins Program Analysis Group (COPAG), National Harbor, MD (in conjunction with the AAS Winter Meeting), 9:00 am-4:00 pm ET (part of the meeting is joint with other PAGs)
• American Astronomical Society (AAS) Winter Meeting, National Harbor, MD (continues through January 16)
• American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (continues through January 16)