What's Happening in Space Policy November 14-19, 2016

Here is our list of space policy events for the week of November 14-19, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them.  The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

The House and Senate return to work for one week beginning tomorrow (Monday).  The House meets for legislative business Monday-Thursday; the Senate will be in pro forma session on Monday and meet for legislative business the rest of the week.  Then they will recess again until after Thanksgiving.

With Republicans retaining control of both chambers, there will be less organizational work to prepare for the 115th Congress that convenes in January.  The one “must do” item between now and the end of the year is passing appropriations bill(s) to fund the government past December 9.  As we wrote yesterday, it’s not clear how that will play out, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wants a government shutdown at this point, so they will have to work something out.  One “probably will do” is complete action on the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  A number of other pieces of legislation could also be completed, such as the NASA Transition Authorization Act, if the various parties can reach agreement.  It’s doubtful any of that will be finalized this week, but progress may be made behind the scenes.

Everyone is still catching their breaths after the stunning election results. The quadrennial parlor game of guessing who will be to tapped to lead NASA and NOAA (and every other government agency) is in full swing along with prognosticating about the incoming Trump Administration’s space priorities.  It’s far too early to know based on the limited information the Trump campaign issued, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to play.  We’ll refrain from speculating on new agency leaders, but, programmatically, here’s our two cents worth on NASA’s future.  Human spaceflight will be fine, though we think the days are numbered for the Asteroid Redirect Mission and fully expect a human return to the surface of the Moon to be restored to the long term plan; space science will hold its own, though within a more constrained budget if deficit-cutting regains popularity; and earth science will not do very well not only because President-elect Trump is a climate change skeptic, but Sen. Barbara Mikulski is retiring so will not be in a position to rescue it.  We don’t have a good feel for aeronautics or space technology.  Both are very popular in theory, but routinely underfunded in practice.  One worry is that if the total NASA budget is constrained due to broad deficit cutting goals, and human spaceflight programs exceed current cost targets — let’s be honest, that would hardly be surprising — other parts of the NASA portfolio will pay the price.   Meanwhile, public private partnerships will continue to be encouraged, as will interagency and international cooperation/coordination.

That will all take place over the next months and years.   Getting back to this week, there is, as usual, a lot of very interesting events coming up.  To pick just three, tomorrow’s meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee at JSC could be interesting (available remotely by WebEx/telecon).  Kathy Lueders, program manager for the commercial crew program, is on the agenda for 1:45 pm Central Time (2:45 pm Eastern). Perhaps she will address some of the issues raised in the letter that Tom Stafford and his ISS Advisory Committee sent to Bill Gerstenmaier about SpaceX’s plans to fuel the Falcon 9 rocket while crews are aboard.  At a minimum, she should provide an update on when the Trump Administration can expect to see American astronauts on American rockets sent to the ISS from American soil.  Instead of launching on Russian rockets from Kazakhstan, as will happen on Thursday when Peggy Whitson and her Soyuz MS-03 crewmates, ESA’s Thomas Pesquet and Roscosmos’s Oleg Novitsky, blast off from Baikonur.

Our second top pick this week is Saturday’s launch of NOAA’s GOES-R satellite. NASA TV is in the unenviable position of needing to cover the Soyuz MS-03 launch and GOES-R pre-launch briefings both on Thursday afternoon, and the Soyuz MS-03 docking at ISS and GOES-R launch, both on Saturday afternoon.  NASA TV has a public channel and a media channel; if you don’t find the programming you’re looking for on one, try the other.   GOES-R is the first of four next-generation geostationary weather satellites that NOAA has been developing for many years.  It will be redesignated GOES-16 once in orbit.  The other three have launch dates stretching out into the mid-2020s.   The spacecraft has an on-board orbit-raising engine similar to one that failed on MUOS-5, but NASA and NOAA are confident that a backup system will get GOES-R to its correct orbit no matter what.

Third is a Washington Space Business Roundtable (WSBR) luncheon on Thursday featuring Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA).   He represents a Seattle-area district that is home to companies like Blue Origin and Planetary Resources — he calls it the Silicon Valley of space.  He is one of the congressional champions of creating a legal and regulatory environment conducive to new types of commercial space ventures and worked with Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) earlier this year to get the House Appropriations Committee to approve the full requested funding level for FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. He may have some insight as to what Capitol Hill will do in these closing weeks of the 114th Congress and his own prognostication of what the next four years have in store for space.

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are shown below.  Check back throughout the week for others that we learn about later and add to our Events of Interest list.

Monday, November 14

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Human Exploration & Operations (HEO) Committee, NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, 9:30 am – 5:30 pm Central Time (10:30 am – 6:30 pm Eastern)   Available by WebEx/telecon

Monday-Tuesday, November 14-15

• NAC Aeronautics Committee, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA (WebEx/telecon, but must contact NASA in advance to get call-in information)
• Small Satellite Workshop (USGIF), NGA East Campus, Springfield, VA (Nov 15 sessions are classified)

Tuesday, November 15

• Webinar on Space Law, Commercial Space and Smallsats (Smith & Howard law firm), virtual, 9:00-10:15 am Mountain Time (11:00 am – 12:15 pm Eastern)
• MSBR Luncheon Featuring DOD’s Doug Loverro, Martin’s Crosswinds, Greenbelt, MD, 11:30 am – 1:30 pm ET

Tuesday-Wednesday, November 15-16

• Workshop on Planetary Science Using JAXA’s Epsilon Rocket, Lunar and Planetary Lab, Tucson, AZ (registration limited)

Tuesday-Thursday, November 15-17

• Center for Orbital Debris Education and Research (CODER) Workshop, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
• SpaceCom 2016, George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, TX

Wednesday-Friday, November 16-18

• Space Traffic Management Conference, Embry Riddle University, Daytona Beach, FL (Nov 17 and 18 will be webcast)

Thursday, November 17

• NAC Ad Hoc STEM Task Force, virtual, 9:30 am – 12:00 pm ET (WebEx/telecon)
• WSBR Luncheon Featuring Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA), University Club, Washington, DC, 11:30 am – 1:30 pm ET
• GOES-R Pre-Launch Briefings, Kennedy Space Center, FL, 1:00 pm ET (press conference ), 2:00 pm ET (mission briefing), watch on NASA TV
• Soyuz MS-03 Launch, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 3:20 pm ET (20:20 GMT), watch on NASA TV

Thursday-Friday, November 17-18

• NOAA Science Advisory Board, the Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA

Friday, November 18

•  NAC Technology, Innovation & Engineering Committee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, 8:00 am – 5:00 pm ET (WebEx/telecon)

Saturday, November 18

• Soyuz MS-03 Arrival at ISS, Earth orbit, docking 5:00 pm ET, hatch opening ~7:35 pm ET, watch on NASA TV
• GOES-R Launch, Cape Canaveral, FL, 5:42 pm ET (one hour launch window), watch on NASA TV

 

Correction: an earlier version of this article listed the start time for Monday’s NAC/HEO meeting as 9:00 am Central Time, but it begins at 9:30 am CT (10:30 am ET).