What’s Happening in Space Policy October 19-25, 2025

What’s Happening in Space Policy October 19-25, 2025

By Marcia Smith | Posted: October 19, 2025 5:32 pm ET | Last Updated: October 19, 2025 5:47 pm ET

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 19-25, 2025 and any insight we can offer about them. The Senate is in session this week. The House remains in recess indefinitely except for pro forma sessions.

During the Week

The government shutdown continues and will begin its fourth week on Wednesday if agreement isn’t reached between Republicans and Democrats on a path forward.  We’ve written about the shutdown extensively and don’t need to repeat it here. Nothing has changed.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota)

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) brought the Republican version of the Continuing Resolution (CR) up for a vote three times last week and it was defeated each time with the same people voting the same way.  The vote totals may change because of absences, but for those who are present all Republicans except Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are in favor, and all Democrats and Independents are against except Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), and Sen. Angus King (I-ME).  The Senate has defeated the CR 10 times now. Thune no longer allows the Democratic alternative to be brought up, but it failed every time as well.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) continues to keep the House in recess in the hope of pressuring enough Senate Democrats to agree to the CR he passed on September 19. The House has not been in session for legislative business since then. Therefore it is not getting any work done, like passing the FY2026 appropriations bills so they don’t end up in this very same situation again.  The government is partially shut down due to a lapse in appropriations.  Agencies that get money through other sources — like mandatory spending (e.g. Social Security and Medicine), what was in the reconciliation bill, or fees — continue as usual, but DOD, NASA and the other departments and agencies with which the public is most familiar are shut down with only essential operations continuing. Those workers are not getting paid except for active duty military personnel. President Trump directed that they get their paychecks nevertheless, with $8 billion reallocated from unobligated RDT&E funds to foot the bill.

The longest shutdown in history was 35 days during Trump’s first term.  An important difference that time was that five of the 12 appropriations bills — including Defense — had passed. Only the agencies in the other seven bills (including NASA) were affected, so paying military personnel wasn’t an issue then.  Whether the two sides can reach agreement this week and get all of the government back to work is anyone’s guess. There’s no public indication either party is ready to find a solution. Hopefully something is going on behind the scenes. As we say every week, anything can happen in Washington.

The Senate is working, even if they can’t pass the CR.  On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on four nominations including Timothy Petty to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. That would make him the Deputy Administrator of NOAA. Petty was Assistant Secretary for Water & Science at the Interior Department in Trump’s first term and was Deputy in that position in the last half of President George W. Bush’s term. Before and in between he’s been a congressional staffer and is currently on the staff of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee’s Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

NASA is shut down other than “excepted” activities that include International Space Station (ISS) operations so plans are proceeding for the launch of the next cargo vehicle. That’s JAXA’s first HTV-X, a new, more capable version of HTV. The last of the original nine HTVs was launched in 2020. Since then JAXA, Mitsubishi and other industry partners have been getting the new H3 rocket and HTV-X ready. H3 has had four successful flights so far.

Japan’s new version of the HTV cargo spacecraft, HTV-X. Credit: JAXA

The launch was scheduled for tomorrow (Monday) Eastern Daylight Time, but JAXA just announced a postponement due to bad weather. It’s not expected to improve for several days so they’re not setting a new launch date for now. Hopefully it still will be this week.


The ISS is coming up on 25 years of continuous human presence and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) will begin the celebration on Tuesday. International crews rotating on roughly 6-month tours have lived aboard the ISS since Expedition 1 — NASA’s Bill Shepherd and Roscosmos’s Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko — floated through the hatch on November 2, 2000.

The International Space Station as seen by Crew-10 as they arrived in March 2025. ISS will celebrate 25 years of continuous human presence on November 2, 2025. Photo credit: NASA

On Tuesday, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Axiom Space’s Vice President of Human Spaceflight Peggy Whitson will discuss “The U.S. Enduring Human Presence in Orbit: Reflecting on the Future and Past 25 Years” with CSIS’s Clayton Swope. Bridenstine is a lobbyist these days including for Special Aerospace Services, one of the companies working with NASA on commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) capabilities.

Peggy Whitson in the ISS cupola when she was a NASA astronaut, April 24, 2017. Now VP of Human Spaceflight at Axiom Space and still making spaceflights to the ISS, she’ll speak at Tuesday’s CSIS event on the past and future of the ISS.

Whitson is a record-holding astronaut, first with NASA and now with Axiom Space. She’s made six flights to the ISS so far: four with NASA, two with Axiom. She was the first woman to command the ISS in 2007 and did it again in 2016-2017, the first woman to serve in that role twice. She holds the record for most cumulative days in space for an American (665 days over her six spaceflights), most spacewalk time for any woman (60 hours, 21 minutes over 10 spacewalks), and was the first female commander of a commercial spaceflight (Axiom 2). She also commanded Axiom 4, the most recent commercial flight to the ISS.

Whitson has an insider’s view of ISS as well as Axiom Station, the space station Axiom is developing to replace the ISS as part of NASA’s commercial LEO destination effort. There have been many delays, which is particularly troublesome for Axiom since the first Axiom Station module is designed to attach to the ISS (it’ll later detach and become a free-flyer) and ISS’s lifetime is running out.  Last Wednesday, Axiom CEO Tejpaul Bhatia was replaced after just six months in the job. Perhaps Whitson will share some new information about Axiom Station’s status in addition to her assessment of ISS’s health after 25 years of permanent human occupancy. Some parts of ISS are older than that. The first segments were launched in 1998. The ISS is old and NASA and its international partners plan to deorbit it in 2030.

There are far too many interesting events this week to summarize here, but one more we’ll highlight is the Secure World Foundation’s 7th annual Summit for Space Sustainability Wednesday-Thursday. This year it’s in Paris in partnership with the Government of France and France’s space agency, CNES. A virtual option is available for a fee. The summit has a standout group of international speakers from government and industry to discuss the long term sustainability of space activities, a topic of growing importance as national security and commercial interests embrace constellations of dozens to thousands of satellites.

The Secure World Foundation’s 7th Summit for Space Sustainability takes place in Paris on Wednesday and Thursday.

Many of the speakers are from Europe, Japan, the UAE and other countries. Most of the U.S. speakers are from industry. We don’t know if the few from government — especially NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, which is developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) — will be able to participate because of the shutdown, but hopefully so.  There are lots of fascinating panel discussions. To name just a few: “Real or Not Real? What Technologies are Truly Critical to Ensure Long-Term Space Sustainability”; “Clearing the Air: Understanding and Engaging on Possible Atmospheric Impacts of Space Activities”; “Space Security Strategies in the European Context”; and “O’ What a  Tangled Web: Navigating the Increasingly Blurry Line between Military and Commercial Space.” All with really top notch participants.

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. NOTE THAT WE ARE NOT LISTING THE HTV-X1 LAUNCH because the new date has not been announced, but it could well take place this week. Check our Calendar for updates.

Monday, October 20

Monday-Friday, October 20-24

Tuesday, October 21

Wednesday, October 22

Wednesday-Thursday, October 22-23

Thursday, October 23

Thursday-Friday, October 23-24

Thursday-Saturday, October 23-25

Friday, October 24

Friday-Saturday October 24-25

Last Updated: Oct 19, 2025 5:47 pm ET

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