What’s Happening in Space Policy October 11-17, 2026

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 11-17, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess, except for pro forma sessions, until after the midterm elections.

During the Week

The week begins tomorrow (Monday) with a holiday, Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and federal offices will be closed.

It’s a relatively quiet week, but some interesting and fun events are on tap.

Crew-12 will recap their almost 8-month mission aboard the ISS on Thursday. NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA’s Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos’s Andrey Fedyaev spent 237 days in space, 235 of them on the ISS, splashing down on Thursday, October 8. Adenot is back home in Europe already. We don’t know if Fedyaev has returned to Star City. So it’s not clear how many will be there for the post-mission briefing, but hopefully all will participate in-person or virtually. Meir did four spacewalks during the mission, bringing her total to 7 and putting her third on the list of most spacewalks by a woman (Peggy Whitson is first at 10 and Suni Williams is next at 9). Adenot did three, one of them with Meir.

Their mission was extended by a few weeks because SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Grace had an oxidizer leak that had to be fixed before Crew-13 could launch, but they got off on October 1 and fortuitously enjoyed the shortest trip ever to the ISS on a Crew Dragon (7 hours 55 minutes). With Crew-12’s return, the ISS is back to its usual crew complement of seven: Crew-13’s Jessica Watkins (NASA), Luke Delaney (NASA), Josh Kutryk (Canadian Space Agency), and Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos), and Soyuz MS-29’s Pyotr Dubrov (Roscosmos), Anna Kikina (Roscosmos), and Anil Menon (NASA).

NASA also will launch the next SpaceX Cargo Dragon this week, SpX-35. Among the cargo is the last set of ISS Roll Out Solar Arrays (iROSAs) that will be deployed over the ISS’s existing solar arrays to augment the space station’s electrical supply. The original solar arrays have deteriorated after more than two decades of exposure to the space environment. Six iROSAs have been installed already.

Elsewhere, the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) is holding its fall meeting at Georgia Tech on Wednesday and Thursday. A virtual option is available, but pre-registration is required.

Keynotes are by James Kenyon, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate (RTMD) on Wednesday, and Ian Clark, MoonFall Chief Engineer at JPL on Thursday. A Wednesday panel on “Repeatable and Precise Lunar Landings” features Allen Butler from Firefly, Phil Metzger from the University of Central Florida, and Dan Hendrickson from Voyager (which recently acquired Astrobotic).  Lots of other great speakers from NASA and industry, including Nujoud Merancy, Chief Architect for the Moon Base program at Johnson Space Center.

On Thursday, NASA will hold a media telecon (audio only) about its role in JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which is getting ready for launch on October 19 EDT (October 20 in Japan). MMX will explore the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, and return samples from Phobos.

NASA is one of JAXA’s international partners in the MMX mission, supplying the MEGANE ((Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma-rays and Neutrons) instrument and the surface sampler mechanism, and will also provide communications and navigation support with the Deep Space Network. MEGANE was developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and Honeybee Robotics (part of Blue Origin) developed the pneumatic sampler mechanism (P-Sampler), through NASA’s Discovery program. JAXA’s Team MMX also includes CNES, DLR, ESA, and Australia (where the sample return capsule will land).

The Washington Space Business Roundtable will hold a luncheon on Tuesday with NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson. Anderson represented the agency at last week’s International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Türkiye where, among other things, many of the Artemis Accords members met.

Perhaps Anderson will have news from the conference and/or on when NASA will provide an update on Artemis III.  In an exchange on X, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said they’re targeting October 23 for that update, but the date wasn’t firmly set.

Those and other events we know about as of October 11 are shown below. Check back throughout the week for others we learn about later and add to our Calendar or changes to these.

Monday, October 12

• Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Federal holiday)

Monday-Friday, October 12-16

• Launch and Re-Entry Safety Analysis (IAASS), Noordwijk, The Netherlands

Tuesday, October 13

• Launch of SpX-35 Cargo Mission to ISS, CCSFS, 6:33 am ET (NASA coverage begins 6:15 am ET)
• WSBR Luncheon with NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson, Hogan Lovells, 555 13th St., NW, Washington, DC, 11:30 am-1:30 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, October 14-15

• LSIC Fall Meeting, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA

Thursday, October 15

• SpX-35 Docks at the ISS, Earth orbit, 11:00 am ET (NASA coverage begins at 9:15 am ET)
• Crew-12 Post Mission News Conference, JSC/online, 3:30 pm ET
• NASA Media Telecon on NASA’s Role in JAXA’s MMX Mission, virtual, 4:00 pm ET (audio only on NASA YouTube)
• 2026 Future of Space Policy Forum and Expo, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, CO, 6:00-8:45 pm MOUNTAIN Time

Thursday-Friday, October 15-16

• 2026 U.S. Space Forum–Project Constellation (U.S. Mission to International Orgs), Vienna, Austria