What’s Happening in Space Policy July 13-19, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of July 13-19, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) will mark up the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday.  The “Chairman’s Mark” and reports from each subcommittee are on the HASC website.

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) finished their markup on Friday.

Authorization bills set policy and recommend funding levels. They don’t actually provide any money, but SASC’s recommendation is $878.7 billion for DOD. That’s on top of the DOD funding in the recently-enacted reconciliation bill ($150 billion, of which $113 billion is for FY2026).  Once HASC finishes their markup, negotiations can begin between the two committees on a final bill. They usually have a lot of differences, but have always reached agreement in the end no matter how tense the political environment or which party is in control. The first NDAA was in 1961. NDAA’s have been enacted every year since. This will be the 65th.

It’s appropriators who have money to spend and the House will take up the FY2026 Defense Appropriations bill this week subject to a rule being granted. The Rules Committee meets tomorrow (Monday). The committee added $3 billion for the U.S. Space Force (USSF). The Administration’s budget request itself, $26.3 billion, was a reduction from last year ($28.7 billion) and the committee restored that plus a bit with a new total of $29 billion. But the Administration views the money in the appropriations and reconciliation bills as one, so from their perspective the request was more like $40 billion and in the end USSF may have fared even better.

It’s tough to follow the Space Force money this year, but three experts will try to do just that during a Space News webinar on Thursday. Fletcher Franklin from BryceTech, Todd Harrison from American Enterprise Institute, and Mike Tierney from National Security Space Association will share their analyses of “Space Force Budget” with Space News’s Mike Gruss.

 

Action also is underway on the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill that funds NASA and NOAA. The House CJS subcommittee will mark up their version of the FY2026 bill on Tuesday. The markup at subcommittee and full committee level was postponed from last week. A new date for full committee markup wasn’t announced.

With the House CJS markups postponed, Senate appropriators ended up going first last week, but the CJS bill failed to advance out of that committee because of an unrelated issue (location of the new FBI headquarters). The outline of the bill was discussed, however, so we know the Senate committee is rejecting the Trump Administration’s budget request for NASA and wants to keep NASA essentially at its current level ($24.9 billion compared to $24.8 billion) instead of being cut 24.3 percent. The science budget would remain where it is at $7.3 billion instead of losing 47 percent. Senate Appropriations Committee chair Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) recessed the committee while the two sides try to find a path forward so we’ll be keeping an eye out for when they might resume. It could be this week. Or not. (Senate appropriations action this week will be centered on the Trump Administration’s rescissions package to claw back $9.4 billion in funding appropriated for FY2025 for public broadcasting and foreign aid. The issue is not space-related so we won’t say more, but Politico has details for anyone who’s interested.)

The House appropriations committee will also mark up the Transportation-HUD bill that funds the FAA, including the Office of Commercial Space Transportation.  Subcommittee markup is tomorrow and the committee released the draft bill late this afternoon. Here are links to the summary and the bill text. Full committee markup is on Thursday according to the committee’s July 11 schedule update.  ICYMI, the Senate confirmed the new FAA Administrator, Bryan Bedford, last week by a vote of 53-43 with opposition centered on Bedford’s unwillingness to commit to the 1,500 hour training requirement for pilots set by Congress after the 2009 Colgan air crash (near Buffalo).

Off the Hill, the big event is Axiom-4’s undocking from the International Space Station tomorrow at 7:05 am ET. Though the private astronaut launch was delayed almost two weeks while NASA and Roscosmos assessed the success of recent repairs to fix air leaks in the Russian segment, they did finally lift off on June 25 and docked on June 26. The four-person international crew had a farewell ceremony today with the seven members of ISS Expedition 73. ISS Commander Takuya Onishi (JAXA) turned the mic over to the Axiom-4 crew: Commander Peggy Whitson (Axiom), Mission Specialist Tibor Kapu (Hungary), Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla (India), and Mission Specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski (Poland/ESA).

Undocking is tomorrow morning, but SpaceX and Axiom haven’t announced the time for splashdown. SpaceX has moved all their splashdowns, crew and cargo, to the West Coast.  As always, these events are weather dependent. [UPDATE, July 14, 4:40 am ET:  during undocking activities this morning, the webcast commentator said splashdown will be on July 15 at 5:31 am ET off the coast of California, about 22.5 hours after undocking.]

In other space station news, China will launch their next cargo mission to their Tiangong-3 space station tomorrow Eastern Daylight Time. Tianzhou-9 is delivering 6.5 Metric Tons of supplies to the three-person crew, including upgraded spacesuits, exercise devices and scientific equipment according to the South China Morning Post. China’s Tiangong-3 space station has been permanently occupied by crews rotating on roughly 6-month schedules since the end of 2022. As usual, China has not said exactly when the Tianzhou-9 launch will take place, but Andrew Jones, a reporter who closely follows China’s space program, estimates 21:40 UTC tomorrow, July 14, which is 5:40 pm EDT (and July 15, 05:40 Beijing time).

On the national security space front, George Washington (GW) University’s Space Policy Institute and the National Security Space Association’s Moorman Center will have an event on Tuesday to launch a new book: “Contested Space: Ensuring Effective U.S. National Security Space Capabilities in an Increasingly Contested Environment” by Christopher Williams, James Frelk, Scott Pace, Marc Berkowitz, and John Paul Parker. Williams says: “This book is chock full of actionable recommendations for the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress on how to better posture the U.S. national security space enterprise to assure U.S. space dominance in the face of increasingly sophisticated threats to critical U.S. space systems.”  A virtual option is available.

Lots of other great events are on tap, including a Washington Space Business Roundtable (WSBR) luncheon on Space Nuclear Strategy on Tuesday (a very busy day). Bhavya Lal, perhaps best known to readers of this website as NASA’s first Associate Administrator for Technology, Policy, and  Strategy, started her career as an MIT-educated nuclear engineer. Now a professor at RAND’s School of Public Policy, she’ll present the findings of her new report “Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for U.S. Space Nuclear Leadership” and then discuss them with L3Harris’s Joe Cassady and Zeno Power’s Alex Gilbert. The report, by Lal and Roger Myers, was funded by Idaho National Laboratory. (Myers co-chaired the 2021 National Academies study on Space Nuclear Propulsion for Human Mars Exploration. Lal was a committee member.)

The topic is very timely as the Trump Administration proposes zeroing NASA’s nuclear electric and nuclear thermal propulsion programs and canceling the DARPA-NASA DRACO program, yet nuclear power and propulsion are increasingly viewed as essential for human exploration and utilization of the Moon and Mars, not to mention national security space missions.

The Maryland Space Business Roundtable has a luncheon this week, too. That’s on Wednesday with Gen. Les Lyles (Ret.) as the speaker. Lyles has an extensive military career, including serving as director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, but is probably best known in the space community as the long-time chair of the NASA Advisory Council (now in abeyance awaiting a Senate-confirmed NASA Administrator) and the Users’ Advisory Group of the Biden-Harris Administration’s National Space Council. (We haven’t heard much about the Trump Administration’s plans for a National Space Council since those rumors in May.) The MSBR website doesn’t indicate a specific topic, but Lyles’s broad perspective on civil and national security space should be quite illuminating.

Lots of other great events both here and abroad including the U.K. Space Conference in Manchester, U.K.

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 (like the splashdown time for Axiom-4) and add to our Calendar or changes to these.

Monday, July 14

• Axiom-4 Undocks from ISS, Earth orbit, 7:05 am ET (coverage begins 4:30 am ET)
• House Appropriations Subcommittee Markup THUD Bill (incl FAA), 2358-A Rayburn House Office Building, 5:00 pm ET (webcast)
• Launch of China’s Tianzhou-9 Cargo Spacecraft to Tiangong-3, Hainan Island, China, 5:40 pm ET?

Monday-Friday, July 14-18

• Progress in Understanding the Pluto System: 15 Years After the Flyby, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, MD

Tuesday, July 15

• UPDATE: Axiom-4 splashdown, coast of California, 5:31 am ET
• HASC Markup FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), 2118 Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am ET (webcast)
• Book Launch: Contested Space (SPI/NSSA), George Washington University, 1957 E St, NW, Washington, DC/virtual, 10:30 am-1:00 pm ET
• WSBR Luncheon on Space Nuclear Strategy, Hogan Lovells, 555 13th St., NW, Washington, DC, 11:30 am?-1:00 pm ET
• House Appropriations CJS Subcommittee Markup, 2362-B Rayburn House Office Building, 12:00 pm ET

Wednesday, July 16

• MSBR Luncheon with Gen. Les Lyles (Ret.), Martin’s Crosswinds, Greenbelt, MD, 11:30 am-1:00 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, July 16-17

• 2025 UK Space Conference, Manchester, UK

Thursday, July 17

• Space Investors Forum (NSSA), Kuiper Government Solutions, Arlington, VA (closed press)
• House Appropriations Full Committee Markup THUD bill (incl FAA), 2359 Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am ET
• NASA Media Telecon on Mission to Study Earth’s Magnetic Shield, virtual, 11:00 am ET (NASA Live)
• Space Force Budget (Space News), virtual, 1:00-200 pm ET

 

Update: The IAA Moon Farside Protection Symposium earlier listed here has slipped to March 2026.