What’s Happening in Space Policy November 3-9, 2024

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of November 3-9, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess until after the November 5 elections except for pro forma sessions.

During the Week

Daylight Saving Time ended in the United States this morning at 2:00 am. Hopefully everyone has already turned their clocks back one hour everywhere except Arizona and Hawaii, which don’t observe this ritual.

Tuesday is election day in the United States. The presidential race and several of the House and Senate congressional races are as close as they can be, so the outcome is totally up in the air. Your vote counts!  If you haven’t voted already, be sure to do so on Tuesday.

In the space world, the week started early this morning aboard both the Chinese Tiangong-3 space station and the U.S.-Russian-Canadian-Japanese-European International Space Station (ISS). Both space stations are permanently occupied with crews rotating on roughly six month schedules.

At 3:12 am Eastern Standard Time (EST) this morning, the three-person Shenzhou-18 crew undocked from Tiangong-3 and headed home after six months in space, landing at 12:24 pm EST (November 4, 1:34 am local time in China). Their replacements, Shenzhou-19, arrived last week.

The return capsule of the Shenzhou-18 manned spaceship, carrying astronauts Ye Guangfu, Li Cong and Li Guangsu, touched down at the Dongfeng landing site in north China.
The three astronauts are all in good health condition, according to the China Manned Space Agency. pic.twitter.com/T9PGaazj6S

— China Xinhua Sci-Tech (@XHscitech) November 3, 2024

At 6:35 am EST, the four-person Crew-9 crew undocked from ISS to move their SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom from the forward port of the Harmony module to the space-facing port, redocking at 7:25 am EST. Crew-9 now consists of NASA’s Nick Hague, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams and Roscosmos’s Aleksandr Gorbunov. Hague and Gorbunov arrived on the Crew-9 spacecraft on September 29, a day after launch. Wilmore and Williams traveled to the ISS on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test and are remaining aboard as part of Crew-9 because Starliner propulsion system failures led NASA to decide to return Starliner to Earth empty. So this was Williams and Wilmore’s first ride in a Crew Dragon. All four crew members had to be aboard for this short trip from one port to another just in case anything went awry and they had to make an emergency return to Earth.

The port relocation frees the forward port for the arrival of SpaceX’s 31st cargo resupply craft, SpX-31, scheduled for launch tomorrow (Monday). NASA and SpaceX will have a pre-launch briefing tomorrow about 3:30 pm ET ahead of the launch, which is scheduled for 9:29 pm ET. If all goes according to plan, SpX-31 will dock on Tuesday at 10:15 am ET. NASA+ will cover it all.

Crew-9 replaced Crew-8, which just splashed down on October 25.  NASA will hold a post-mission briefing with Crew-8 on Friday afternoon. One of the three NASA astronauts — Matt Dominick, Mike Barratt or Jeanette Epps — spent the night in a Pensacola hospital after splashdown. They all looked fine in this NASA photo after they were brought aboard the recovery ship (L-R): Aleksandr Grebenkin (Roscosmos), Mike Barratt (NASA), Matt Dominick (NASA), Jeanette Epps (NASA).

NASA will not say who was hospitalized or why due to privacy concerns. They had a pretty eventful mission even before that. Dominick and Barratt were both involved in spacewalks that were scrubbed at the last minute. Then their return to Earth was delayed by about two months. First NASA had to decide what to do about Starliner. If Williams and Wilmore were going to stay on ISS, they would need two of the Crew-9 seats for their return to Earth and two of the original Crew-9 would have to stay home. That’s what happened. With that decision finally made, a three-week stretch of bad weather in Florida caused more delays. Should be an interesting briefing.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) holds a meeting Wednesday-Thursday virtually. It starts right off with a Mars Sample Return update. Other updates follow on the Planetary Science Program and Mars Exploration Program generally, Moon to Mars, CLPS, and many more.

On Thursday and Friday, two of the government’s major astrophysics advisory committees are meeting at the same time.  The National Academies’ Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics (CAA) meets at the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA. Open sessions will be livestreamed.  The Federal Register notice doesn’t disclose where NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee (APAC) is meeting, just that public participation is virtual only and questions may be submitted via a NASA website before the meeting begins. The two agendas don’t have a lot of overlap except that Astrophysics Division Director Mark Clampin will speak at both — to APAC on Thursday and CAA on Friday.

On the national security space front, on Tuesday the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) and U.S. Embassy and Consulates in France will have an interesting discussion on “Enhancing Collective Security in Outer Space: Challenges and Opportunities at the Dawn of a New Space Age.” Victoria Samson, Chief Director for Space Security and Stability at the Secure World Foundation, will share her views on “the critical role of collective security in space” and then be joined by James Clay Molz from the Naval Postgraduate School in a panel discussion moderated by FRS’s Xavier Pasco. Michael Turner, Counselor for Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, will offer opening remarks. It’s at 5:30 Central European Time, which is 11:30 am EST, via Zoom.

On Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess will speak at a Mitchell Institute webinar. Schiess is Commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space and U.S. Space Command’s Combined Joint Force Space Component Commander. Schiess will be talking about his role at U.S. Space Forces-Space, or S4S, one of the five U.S. Space Force component commands that support several of the 11 Unified Combatant Commands, which we wrote about two weeks ago. All these different and similarly sounding positions are confusing, we know. Perhaps Schiess can connect the dots.

Schiess also will give a keynote address at Thursday’s Space Domain Awareness Forum hosted by the National Security Space Association in McLean, VA. It features an impressive group of current and former government officials plus an industry panel with five commercial companies that offer space domain awareness products. In addition to Schiess, other keynoters are Barbara Golf, U.S. Space Force (USSF) Strategic Advisor for Space Domain Awareness; Col. Raj Agrawal, Commander, Mission Delta 2, USSF; F. Schnell, Director, Battlespace Awareness System Delta, Space Systems Command (SSC); and Col. Richard Kniseley, Senior Materiel Leader, Commercial Space Office, SSC.  Richard DalBello, Director of the NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, and Thomas Colvin from NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, are on a panel in the morning.

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, November 3

• Daylight Saving Time Ends in the United States
• Shenzhou-18 Crew Returns from Tiangong-3 Space Station, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China
• Crew Dragon Port Relocation on the ISS, Earth orbit, 6:35-7:18 am ET

Monday, November 4

• Navigating GPS Vulnerabilities: Implications for U.S. Economic and National Security (Hudson Inst), Washington, DC/online, 10:00-11:30 am ET

Monday-Tuesday, November 4-5

• SpaceX-31 Cargo Mission to ISS
  • November 4, 3:30 pm ET, pre-launch briefing
  • November 4, 9:29 pm ET, launch (NASA coverage begins 9:10 pm ET)
  • November 5, 10:15 am ET, dock (NASA coverage begins 8:45 am ET)
• Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space (National Academies), Beckman Center, Irvine, CA (some sessions are open, some are closed. Open sessions will be livestreamed)

Tuesday, November 5

• Election Day in the United States
• Enhancing Collective Security in Space (FRS/U.S. Embassy in France), virtual, 11:30 am-12:45 pm ET (5:30-6:45 pm CET)

Wednesday, November 6

• Schriever Spacepower Series with Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, virtual, 1:30 pm ET
• Virgin Galactic 3Q2023 Financial Results Telecon, virtual, 5:00 pm ET
• ISU-DC Space Café with AIA’s Steven Jordan Tomaszewski, 1020 N Highland St., Arlington, VA, 6:00-8:00 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, November 6-7

• NASA Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), virtual

Thursday, November 7

• Space Domain Awareness Forum (NSSA), MITRE Corp., McLean, VA, 8:30 am-6:00 pm ET
• Redwire 3Q2024 Financial Results Telecon, virtual, 9:00 am ET

Thursday-Friday, November 7-8

• Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics (National Academies), Beckman Center, Irvine, CA (some sessions are open, some are closed. Open sessions will be livestreamed.)
• NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee, public participation virtual only

Friday, November 8

• NASA-DARES 2025 Astrobiology  Town Hall, virtual, 1:00 pm ET
• NASA Crew-8 Post Mission Briefing, JSC, 3:15 pm ET (watch on NASA+)

Friday-Saturday, Novemer 8-9

• Space Settlement Summit (NSS), Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Merritt Island, FL