What’s Happening in Space Policy June 22-28, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of June 22-28, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

Up on Capitol Hill, the Senate has been planning to use this week to try and get agreement from at least 51 Senators on its version of the reconciliation bill, but their attention may be diverted by debate over President Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities last night.  There is strong disagreement as to whether the President should have gotten congressional authorization before acting, a topic well outside the purview of this website other than to note that it could slow action on other fronts.

The reconciliation bill has quite a few hurdles to get over in any case. One is ensuring compliance with the “Byrd Rule” set decades ago by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) intended to ensure this special filibuster-skirting legislation is used only for its intended purpose — deficit reduction. Provisions are only supposed to affect spending and revenue. The Senate Parliamentarian puts the proposals through a “Byrd Bath,” ruling on which provisions are in compliance or not. That process is underway and a number of provisions have been ruled out already. The space-related provisions for DOD and NASA are still in as far as we know.

The goal was to get the bill to the President’s desk by July 4, but that clearly won’t happen if they stick to their current schedule. The House and Senate plan to begin the July 4 recess at the end of this week. At best, it might get through the Senate by then, but it will  have to go back to the House for another vote since the Senate is making changes. Both chambers return on July 7.

The clock is ticking on appropriations, too. It’s almost the end of June and the House Appropriations Committee has approved only two of the 12 FY2026 bills, Defense and Military Construction, using interim “302(b)” allocations that set the total amount of money each subcommittee can spend. The House will take up the MilCon bill this week and the committee will vote on three others, but there’s been no action on NASA.

NASA is part of the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) subcommittee and that 302(b) allocation is yet to be determined.  The CJS subcommittee hasn’t held a hearing on NASA’s request and none is scheduled for this week. They’ll be out next week. But they plan to mark up the CJS bill at subcommittee level on July 7, the day they return. The markup isn’t until 5:30 pm, so conceptually they could have a hearing earlier in the day as they did with DOD — the DOD hearing was at 10:00 am and subcommittee markup was at noon. We’ll just have to see what they do. Full committee markup is scheduled for July 10. NASA may not have a Senate-confirmed Administrator yet, but Acting Administrator Janet Petro could at least spell out the Trump Administration’s plan. FYI, Bloomberg is reporting that Petro told them at the Paris Air Show last week that the earliest a new Administrator could be confirmed is October “but the process could last into March” of 2026.

The Senate Appropriations Committee will have a hearing this week (Thursday) on the budget request for the Air Force and Space Force, but there’s no sign of a NASA hearing on the Senate side, either.  Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin will testify at Thursday’s Defense Subcommittee hearing.

Also on the Hill this week, the Senate Commerce Committee will vote on Bryan Bedford’s nomination to head the FAA, of which the Office of Commercial Space Transportation is part. They’ll also vote on Sen. Gary Peters’ (D-MI) Space Commerce Advisory Committee Act. The bipartisan bill, reintroduced from the last Congress, would establish that advisory committee within the Office of Space Commerce to allow the space industry to provide advice to the government on issues affecting the commercial space sector.

Off the Hill and on the launch pads, it seems a bit like Groundhog Day. ULA’s second Project Kuiper launch (Kuiper 2), the Axiom-4 private astronaut mission, and Blue Origin’s New Shepard-33 were on our list last week (and Axiom-4 the week before that), but are still on the ground.

At least ULA has a new launch date — tomorrow (Monday). The planned June 16 launch was scrubbed due to an “engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine,” which is now fixed. ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno posted a timelapse video of the Atlas V returning to the launch pad yesterday getting ready for the 6:54 am ET launch tomorrow morning.  ULA’s webcast begins 20 minutes in advance.

Mighty Atlas out for a stroll and back on the pad.
Ps this is a time-lapse. IRL, the 2.5M pound Mobile Launch Platform travels at a blistering 3 mph or so.

[image or embed]

— Tory Bruno (@torybruno.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 2:39 PM

As for the Axiom-4 crew, they are still in quarantine at Kennedy Space Center waiting for NASA to determine the status of air leaks on the ISS. The Russians apparently plugged the long-standing leaks in the PrK tunnel at the far end of the Russian segment, but leaks persist. Somewhere. NASA is providing scant information to the public, so we really don’t know what’s going on. The American-Indian-Polish-Hungarian crew have been in quarantine since May 25 for what was to have been a launch on June 10. That was postponed to June 11 by high winds along the ascent corridor and then to June 12 because of a liquid oxygen leak on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But that day NASA said it was stopping the launch to assess the air leak situation on ISS. On June 17 they finally reset the launch for today (June 22), but on June 19 postponed it again. No new date has been announced as of press time.

There’s no new date for NS-33, either. That launch was scrubbed on Saturday due to high winds, rescheduled for today, and scrubbed again due to weather. The six passengers are all conservationists.

Hopefully ULA Kuiper 2, Ax-4 and NS-33 all will get off the ground this week.  We’re not including Ax-4 or NS-33 in our list, though, since no dates have been set.  Check our Calendar for updates.

Overseas, ispace will provide an update on their investigation of what went wrong on their Mission 2 lunar landing mission two weeks ago.  It was another tough break for Japan’s commercial lunar landing company whose motto is “Never Quit the Lunar Quest.”  Their first attempt in 2023 failed moments before landing and so did this one, SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon with the RESILIENCE lander and TENACIOUS micro-rover.  The 2023 failure was due to a software error.  Will be very interesting to learn what happened this time. The press conference will be livestreamed on ispace’s YouTube channel.

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. We’ll especially be keeping an eye out for news on Ax-4 and NS-33.

Saturday-Friday, June 21-27

• International Planetary Probe Workshop, Stuttgart, Germany

Sunday-Friday, June 22-27

• European Lunar Symposium, Münster, Germany

Monday, June 23

• ULA Second Project Kuiper Launch (Kuiper 2), Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, FL, 6:54 am ET (webcast)
• Space Force International Partnership Strategy (CSIS), virtual, 10:00-11:00 am ET
• ispace Briefing on Mission 2 Failure Investigation, Tokyo, Japan/online, 9:00 pm ET (10:00 am June 24 in Tokyo)

Monday-Friday, June 23-27

• Living Planet Symposium (ESA), Vienna, Austria (some sessions webcast on ESA TV)

Tuesday, June 24

• Schriever Spacepower Series with USSF’s Kelly Hammett (Mitchell Inst), virtual, 9:00-10:00 am ET
• ESA Media Briefing on Upcoming Launches of MTG-S1 and Sentinel-4, Vienna, Austria, 9:00 am ET (webcast on ESA TV — part of the Living Planet Symposium)

Tuesday-Wednesday, June 24-25

• NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), Arvada, CO/online

Wednesday, June 25

• Aerospace Nation with DARPA’s Rob McHenry (Mitchell Inst), virtual, 9:00 am ET
• Senate Commerce Committee Executive Session, 253 Russell Senate Office Building, 10:00 am ET (webcast)
• Geospatial Intelligence: New Data to Solutions (Space News), virtual, 1:00-2:00 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, June 25-26

• 8th Annual Smallsat & Space Access Summit (DSI), National Harbor, MD

Wednesday-Friday, June 25-27 (continues next week)

• U.N. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), Vienna, Austria (webcast)

Thursday, June 26

• Senate Appropriations Sbcmte Hearing on FY2026 Budget for the Air Force and Space Force, 192 Dirksen Senate Office Building, 10:30 am ET (webcast)

This article has been updated.