President Biden’s Executive Order on the White House National Space Council not only added five members, but expanded the Council’s authority to include making budget recommendations for the President’s space priorities.
NASA announced the selection of ten new astronaut candidates today. After two years of training, they will be eligible for flight assignments as part of the NASA astronaut corps. The six men and four women span a range of experience and backgrounds, but with an emphasis on science and engineering and military service.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of December 5-11, 2021 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
NASA selected three winners today for contracts to design commercial space facilities to replace the International Space Station. The contracts are for design only. Another competition will be held in a few years for one or more companies to actually build space stations in low Earth orbit where NASA can be just one of many customers purchasing services to conduct research instead of owning the facility itself.
The first meeting of the Biden-Harris Administration’s National Space Council covered a lot of ground, but a main focus was Russia’s recent antisatellite test and the resulting debris that is imperiling satellites in low Earth orbit, not to mention the seven crewmembers aboard the International Space Station.
In conjunction with her first meeting of the White House National Space Council, Vice President Kamala Harris is releasing a Space Priorities Framework for the Biden-Harris Administration. Harris chairs the Council. President Biden also is signing an Executive Order adding five new Council members today, bringing the total to 20.
The first meeting of the White House National Space Council under the Biden-Harris Administration will take place in Washington, D.C. tomorrow afternoon. The time and location were only made public this evening and an agenda is yet to be released, but whatever transpires will set the tone for Vice President Kamala Harris’s leadership of the Council at a critical time for the U.S. space program. The 1:30 pm EST meeting at the U.S. Institute for Peace will be livestreamed on the White House website.
The bipartisan leadership of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee has sent letters to Vice President Harris and Secretary of Commerce Raimondo urging them to step up efforts to address the threat from space debris. Russia’s recent antisatellite test created more than 1,500 new pieces of trackable debris, underscoring the need to find ways to maintain the long-term sustainability of the space environment they said.
NASA abruptly decided to cancel a spacewalk they had just given the green light hours earlier because of a debris threat they need time to analyze. They did not indicate the source of the debris. [UPDATE: The spacewalk has been rescheduled for December 2 after NASA determined the debris did not pose a risk.]
Two NASA astronauts will make a spacewalk tomorrow even though Russia’s antisatellite test two weeks ago increased the amount of debris in the space station’s path. A NASA official said the elevated risk is still within NASA’s accepted limits. [UPDATE: NASA later postponed this spacewalk until Thursday due to a debris issue.]