What’s Happening in Space Policy June 14-20, 2026

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of June 14-20, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The Senate is in session for part of the week. The House is in recess except for pro forma sessions.

During the Week

This Friday is a federal holiday — Juneteenth — and government offices will be closed. Juneteenth National Independence Day celebrates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States at the end of the Civil War and became a federal holiday in 2021.

The House is taking the entire week off, while the Senate will be in session except for Friday.  We’re still waiting for word on when the Senate Appropriations Committee will reschedule consideration of the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill that funds NASA. It was on the books for June 4 along with two other bills (Agriculture and Legislative Branch), but everything was postponed because of controversy over matters in the Justice portion of the CJS bill.  It might get rescheduled this week, but we haven’t heard anything yet. We’ll post any news we get on our Calendar. (The House Appropriations committee approved their version of the CJS bill back on May 13.)

Overall, it’s pretty quiet this week compared to everything that’s been happening recently, but there still are some interesting events on tap. Among them is an ESA media briefing on Wednesday following its quarterly ESA Council meeting. It’ll be livestreamed.

Last week NASA introduced the Artemis III crew, which includes Luca Parmitano, an ESA astronaut from Italy. At a media event three days ago at the Berlin Air Show, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher was asked a number of questions about the state of ESA’s participation in the Artemis program. One was how Parmitano’s appointment to Artemis III relates to the earlier NASA/ESA agreement to send three ESA astronauts to the Gateway lunar space station. Aschbacher had said those ESA astronauts would be from Germany, France, and Italy, and a German astronaut would be first. With Gateway “paused,” new negotiations with NASA are beginning, he said, and Parmitano’s assignment to an earth-orbiting mission is one step. But Aschbacher emphasized his “ambition” is getting ESA astronauts to the lunar surface and those discussions are underway. He also said negotiations are ongoing with NASA for two more European Service Modules. Built by Airbus through a NASA/ESA barter arrangement, they’re the propulsion system for the Orion spacecraft. Six were acquired originally and this would be seven and eight. That was interesting since the fate of Orion after flight five has been unclear. Wednesday’s briefing may have more news.

Also on Wednesday, NASA and Katalyst Space will have a briefing on their plans to try and reboost NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Swift has been in space since 2004 studying gamma-ray bursts and its orbit is rapidly decaying. It has three multiwavelength telescopes looking at the universe in the visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray bands. (Gehrels was Swift’s Principal Investigator. NASA named the observatory in his honor after he passed away in 2017.)

NASA contracted with Katalyst in September 2025 to demonstrate the potential of on-orbit servicing by boosting Swift. Katalyst will launch its LINK spacecraft on a Pegasus XL rocket to attach to Swift and raise the orbit over several months.  Last Tuesday, LINK was installed into Pegasus at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Pegasus will be mounted to Stargazer, a modified L-1011 aircraft, and they will fly to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands where the launch to Swift will take place later this month. The air-launched Pegasus rocket was developed by Orbital Sciences Corp., which merged with ATK to form Orbital ATK and it was later acquired by Northrop Grumman. The first Pegasus flight was in 1990 and this will be the last.

If this reboost is successful, it could pave the way for future reboosts, perhaps of the Hubble Space Telescope. Before he was NASA Administrator, Jared Isaacman proposed exactly that and offered to pay for it as part of his series of Polaris private astronaut missions, but NASA declined for fear the effort might damage the telescope. Astronauts on the space shuttle visited Hubble five times to make repairs and replace instruments and other equipment, but they were extensively trained and the shuttle was outfitted with a remote manipulator system that could grab onto Hubble. There are those who still yearn for a reboost of the beloved telescope before Hubble’s orbit decays in the mid-2030s. A successful demonstration of reboost with Swift could change the equation, although now that he’s Administrator, Isaacman is worried about the operating costs of old spacecraft like Hubble (about $85 million a year).  It wouldn’t be surprising for questions about Hubble to come up at Wednesday’s briefing.

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, June 14

• EXOPAG (in conjunction with the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society), Pasadena Convention Center, Pasadena, CA, 8:00 am-5:45 pm PACIFIC Time

Sunday-Tuesday, June 14-16

• 9th Prague Space Security Conference, Prague, Czech Republic

Monday, June 15

• Review of Progress on the Earth Science Decadal Survey (National Academies), Keck Center, 500 5th St., NW, Washington, DC, 9:00 am-6:00 pm ET (livestreamed)

Monday-Wednesday, June 15-17 (local time)

• India Space Congress, New Delhi, India
• RAMSES Mission Workshop, Padua, Italy (in conjunction with the Apophis T-3 Years workshop)

Monday-Thursday, June 15-18 (continued from last week)

• U.N. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Vienna, Austria
• Galactic Frontiers 2026: Advancing X-Ray Astronomy, Bad Honnef, Germany

Tuesday, June 16

• SpX-34 Departs ISS, 12:05 pm ET (NASA coverage begins 11:45 am ET)

Wednesday, June 17

• ESA Media Briefing Following 347th ESA Council Meeting, ESA HQ, Paris, FR, 9:30 am ET (15:30 CEST), watch on ESA TV
• NASA/Katalyst Media Telecon on Reboosting Swift Observatory, 11:00 am ET (watch on NASA YouTube)

Thursday-Friday, June 18-19

• Apophis T-3 Years: Knowledge Opportunities for the Science of Planetary Defense, Padua, Italy (in conjunction with the RAMSES Mission Workshop)

Friday, June 19

• Juneteenth National Independence Day (Federal Holiday)

Saturday-Friday, June 20-26

• 23th International Planetary Probe Workshop, Washington, DC