What’s Happening in Space Policy March 2-9, 2025

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of March 2-9, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

The week has begun already with Firefly’s successful landing of Blue Ghost Mission 1 on the Moon at 3:34 am ET this morning. Certainly an energizing start to a busy week that includes ANOTHER lunar landing (Intuitive Machines’s IM-2), SpaceX’s eighth Starship test flight, and the launch of NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions. Not to mention media events associated with the upcoming crew rotation on ISS.

Let’s start on Capitol Hill, though.  Without getting into the details, the House was able to pass their Budget Resolution last week by the closest of margins. That sets off negotiations with the Senate over their two entirely different bills, but perhaps they now can focus on the nearer-term issue of funding the government for the rest of FY2025. The existing Continuing Resolution (CR) expires in two weeks on March 14.  Negotiations between Republicans and Democrats aren’t going very well at the moment. The two top Democratic appropriators — Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) — issued a statement on Friday warning Republicans they are increasing the risk of a shutdown by trying to incorporate Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts into a new full-year CR.  We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

The biggest event on the Hill this week is Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. We haven’t heard any rumors about whether President Trump will say anything about the space program, but considering that he used his Inaugural Address to lend support for sending people to Mars, it wouldn’t be surprising. Perhaps this morning’s successful landing of Firefly’s commercial spacecraft on the Moon, and Intuitive Machines’s expected landing on Thursday, might prompt a kind word about our nearest celestial neighbor?

The House SS&T Committee has what could be an interesting hearing for the space community on Wednesday, but it’s not clear from the title what topics will be covered. “Assessing the Threat to U.S. Funded Research” is pretty broad, but one of the three witnesses is renowned planetary scientist Maria Zuber from MIT.   Zuber was MIT’s vice president for research for a decade and in 2023 was appointed as MIT’s Presidential Advisor for Science and Technology.  She was co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the Biden Administration.  With such broad expertise in science writ large, it’s tough to gauge how much space research will factor into the discussion. She did just finish chairing the independent review of the Mars Sample Return mission, though, so it’s possible something about space will come up.

The day before (Tuesday), the House Energy and Commerce Committee will mark up 12 bills including the Precision Agriculture Satellite Connectivity Act (Latta, H.R. 1139). The bill passed the House in 2023, but there was no further action in the 118th Congress so they are starting again.  It promotes the use of satellites for precision agriculture.

Elsewhere there’s a lot going on, too, starting tomorrow (Monday) with the Starship Integrated Flight Test-8 (IFT-8).  The launch window opens at 5:30 pm CENTRAL time (6:30 pm Eastern). SpaceX determined that the “most probable root cause” of the IFT-7 Starship exploding over the Turks and Caicos Islands in January was because of propellant leaks caused by “a harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing, which led to increased stress on hardware in the propulsion system.”  The FAA OK’d the launch of IFT-8 while the IFT-7 investigation continues.

SpaceX said it’s made “several hardware and operational changes” to increase Starship’s reliability. Starship (the “ship”) is the second stage although it’s often used to refer to the Super Heavy/Starship combination. Super Heavy (the “booster”) is the first stage that returns to the launch pad to be caught by the “chopsticks.”  They plan to do that again this time. Simply amazing.

That’s on Monday.  On Tuesday, NASA will launch the SPHEREx space telescope and a set of four cubesats called PUNCH from Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA (a pre-launch press conference is tomorrow afternoon). Over the course of two years, SPHEREx — Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer — will “collect data on more than 450 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe.” PUNCH — Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere — will study the solar wind.

On Thursday, Intuitive Machines’s second lunar lander, IM-2, will land on the Moon. Two U.S. lunar landers arriving at the Moon in just four days! That is truly remarkable.  IM’s lander, Athena, carries 10 payloads for NASA and other customers, including NASA’s PRIME-1 drill that will penetrate one meter into the Moon’s surface and bring up samples to be analyzed by a mass spectrometer. Unlike most of these small, comparatively inexpensive lunar landers that have been launched in the past couple of years, this one is taking the fast track, just eight days from launch to arrival.  We’re told it will land around lunchtime (CENTRAL Time) and live coverage will be on NASA+, but don’t have specifics yet.

Japan’s ispace has its own lunar lander, RESILIENCE, and rover, TENACIOUS, on the way. They launched on the same rocket as Firefly, but they are taking a longer route. ispace will hold a press conference tomorrow evening Eastern Standard Time (Tuesday morning in Japan) to provide an update on how things are going.  It will be available on Zoom and although it will be in Japanese, the Zoom session will have an option for translation into English. Like Intuitive Machines, this is ispace’s second mission. The first failed due to a software error. Company CEO Takeshi Hakamada wants the space community to embrace failure for the lessons it teaches, not reject it, and “Never Quit the Lunar Quest.”

There’s so much more this week, like Tuesday’s on-orbit news conference with the three NASA members of Crew-9 (Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams and Nick Hague) as they begin to get ready to come home. Their replacements on Crew-10 will launch on March 12.  Crew-9, including Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, can climb into their ready-and-waiting SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft that has been docked to ISS since September, and return to Earth after an approximately five-day handover. On Friday, NASA will hold the overview press conference that had been scheduled for February 24. NASA said the also-postponed crew news conference would follow Crew-10’s arrival at Kennedy Space Center, which we think is also Friday although we haven’t seen that officially.

One last thing we want to mention is that Daylight Saving Time begins in the United States at 2:00 am Sunday, which is why we’re including it in this week’s edition. We won’t publish next week’s till later that day.  Remember that other countries change to summer time on various dates and some don’t change at all.  Even here in the U.S., two states don’t observe this annual ritual — Arizona and Hawaii. Be sure to check the time zone of whatever meeting you may be participating in virtually.

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, March 2

• Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission-1 Lands on the Moon, 3:34 am ET

Sunday-Saturday, March 2-March 8 (continued from March 1)

• IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT

Monday, March 3

• NASA Pre-Launch News Conference for SPHEREx and PUNCH, virtual, 3:30 pm ET
• SpaceX Starship Integrated Flight Test-8 (IFT-8), Boca Chica, TX, 6:30 pm ET (5:30 pm local time)
• Update on Japan’s SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon Mission (ispace), Tokyo/Zoom, 7:15 pm ET (March 4, 9:15 am local time in Japan)

Monday-Wednesday March 3-5

• AFA Warfare Symposium, Aurora, CO

Tuesday, March 4

• On-Orbit News Conference with NASA Members of Crew-9 on ISS, Earth orbit, 11:55 am ET (NASA+)
• Launch Preview for SPHEREx and PUNCH, virtual, 12:00 pm ET
• House Energy and Commerce Committee Markup, 2123  Rayburn House Office Building, 2:00 pm ET (webcast)
• Overview of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA/AMS), virtual, 3:00 pm ET
• State of the Union Address, U.S. Capitol, 9:00 pm ET
• Launch of SPHEREx and PUNCH, Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA, 10:09 pm ET

Tuesday-Wednesday, March 4-5

• 11th IAA Space Traffic Management Conference, Austin, TX

Wednesday, March 5

• Space Security 2025 (Chatham House), London/online, 4:00-11:00 am ET (9:00 am-4:00 pm local time in London)
• House SS&T Subcommittee Hearing on Assessing the Threat to U.S. Funded Research, 2318 Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am ET (webcast)
• Leadership Dinner with NRO Director Chris Scolese (INSA), Hilton McLean Tysons Corner, McLean, VA, 5:30-9:30 pm ET

Thursday, March 6

• Intuitive Machines’s IM-2 Lands on Moon, around lunchtime Central Standard Time, details TBA

Friday, March 7

• NASA Overview Briefing for Crew-10, KSC, time TBA
• Crew-10 Crew Briefing?, KSC, details TBA

Friday, March 7 – Saturday, March 15

• SXSW, Austin, TX

Sunday, March 9

• Daylight Saving Time Begins in the United States, 2:00 am