What’s Happening in Space Policy May 29-June 5, 2022
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week plus a day of May 29-June 5, 2022 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess this week (except for pro forma sessions).
During the Week
The work week starts with a federal holiday, Memorial Day, and Congress is taking the entire week off.
It’s pretty quiet overall, but still some very interesting events. NASA has two. On Wednesday, it will announce the winner(s) of the competition to build next generation spacesuits for lunar missions and the International Space Station. On Thursday, the agency will highlight some of the science experiments that will be delivered to ISS on the SpaceX-25 cargo mission, scheduled for launch on June 9.
Russia is getting ready to launch its own cargo mission to ISS, Progress MS-20. That’s on Friday and NASA TV will provide coverage of launch and docking. Progress MS-20 is taking the fast route to ISS and will dock just about three hours after launch.
NASA and other space agencies will participate in a workshop on planetary protection for crewed missions to Mars organized by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Wednesday-Thursday. The virtual meeting is part of the Planetary Protection Knowledge Gaps for Human Missions to Mars series. We couldn’t find the agenda online, but it certainly is an intriguing topic.
Thursday is a really busy day. In addition to the NASA SpX-25 science briefing, the Mitchell Institute will hold the next in its Schriever Spacepower Forum webinar series. The guest is Lt. Gen. William Liquori, Jr, Deputy Chief of Space Operations, Strategy, Plans, Programs, Requirements, and Analysis. He’ll talk about how the U.S. Space Force plans to address “the threats of today and tomorrow.”
The Aerospace Corporation will hold its next Space Policy Show webinar the same day to discuss one of its recent reports, “Assessing Commercial Solutions for Government Space Missions” by David McQuiggan and Ron Birk. Birk will discuss the report with Phil McAlister, Director of NASA’s Commercial Spaceflight Division, and Clare Grason, Chief of U.S. Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office.
The Washington Space Business Roundtable will hold a webinar that day on “Environmental Intelligence: The Role of Space, Demand, and Opportunity.” Nancy Colleton from the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies will moderate a panel that includes David Gauthier from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Ed Kearns from the First Street Foundation and formerly the Chief Data Officer for the Department of Commerce, and Tahara Dawkins, chief of staff of the White House National Space Council and former Director of the Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs office at NOAA.
The biggest event actually is next Sunday, a week from today, when China is expected to launch its next space station crew, Shenzhou-14. As usual, China hasn’t officially announced the day yet, but it is expected on June 5. We’re including it in this edition of What’s Happening since the next issue probably won’t be posted before the launch.
China’s state news agency Xinhua published a series of images today of the Long March 2F rocket and Shenzhou-14 spacecraft being rolled out to the launch pad at Jiuquan, their launch site in the Gobi Desert. All their crewed launches take off from there. This launch is the first of several this year that will open a new era in the Chinese space station program. Two more space station modules are scheduled for launch this summer and fall and China will perform their first crew rotation with the Shenzhou-14 crew handing off operations to Shenzhou-15 just as the International Space Station crews have kept the ISS permanently occupied for more than 21 years. We’ll have an article about China’s plans in coming days.
Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning May 29 are shown below. Check back throughout the week for others we learn about later and add to our Calendar, or changes to these.
Monday, May 30
- Memorial Day (federal holiday)
Tuesday-Saturday, May 31-June 4
- State of the Space Industrial Base Workshop (New Space New Mexico), Albuquerque, NM/virtual
Wednesday, June 1
- NASA News Conference Announcing Winner(s) of NextGen Spacesuit Development Competition, Johnson Space Center, TX, 2:00 pm ET (NASA TV)
Wednesday-Thursday, June 1-2
- Planetary Protection for Crewed Missions to Mars (COSPAR/NASA), virtual, 9:30 am – 3:00 pm ET each day
Wednesday-Friday, June 1-3
- U.N. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (continues next week), Vienna, Austria/virtual
- Asia Satellite Business Week Summit (Euroconsult), Singapore
Thursday, June 2
- Schriever Spacepower Forum with LTG William Liquori, Jr. (Mitchell Inst), virtual, 9:00 am ET
- NASA Briefing on Science Aboard the SpX-25 Cargo Mission to ISS, virtual, 1:00 pm ET
- Assessing Commercial Solutions for Government Space Missions (Aerospace Corp.), virtual, 1:00 pm ET
- Environmental Intelligence: The Role of Space, Demand, and Opportunity (WSBR), virtual, 2:00 pm ET
- UW Space Dialogue on R&D Across the Space Surveillance Enterprise, virtual, 3:00 pm ET
Friday, June 3
- Launch and Docking of Progress MS-20, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan/Earth orbit, 5:32 am ET/9:03 am ET (NASA TV)
Sunday, June 5
- Anticipated Launch of Shenzhou-14 to the China Space Station, Jiuquan, China, details TBA
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