President Trump announced his intent to nominate Chris Scolese, Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, to become the next director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) today. Scolese has a long history at NASA, including serving as Acting Administrator during the changeover from the George W. Bush to Barack Obama administrations.
NASA released a new schedule for the test flights of the SpaceX and Boeing commercial crew transportation systems. Both companies’ dates slipped to the right a bit, but are still in 2019. At last night’s State of the Union address, President Trump asserted that Americans would fly into space on American rockets “this year.”
Newly-elected Rep. Kendra Horn (D-OK) will speak at next week’s Commercial Space Transportation conference (CST2019) in Washington, D.C., her first appearance at a space conference since her appointment as chair of the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. A former Space Foundation official, she is well acquainted with the issues.
In his State of the Union (SOTU) address tonight, President Trump gave shoutouts to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon and upcoming commercial crew launches, but neglected his own plans to return humans to the lunar surface and someday send them to Mars. Nor did he mention the Space Force, which he has loudly championed for the past year.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of February 3-9, 2019 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate will be in session this week.
The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold its organizational meeting for the 116th Congress next week. The committee’s jurisdiction includes NASA, NOAA, and commercial space offices at the FAA and Department of Commerce. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) is the new chairwoman of the full committee and a newly-elected Representative from Oklahoma will chair the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee.
Acting Secretary of Defense (SecDef) Patrick Shanahan said today that he will propose that the Space Force be part of the U.S. Air Force instead of a separate department in order to avoid creating a big bureaucracy, Congress’s biggest concern. He also revealed that an individual has been chosen to lead the new U.S. Space Command, but he is not ready to say who it is.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced last week that the annual Day of Remembrance honoring fallen astronauts would have to be postponed because of the partial government shutdown. Today is the first of the three anniversaries of tragedies that befell the U.S. human spaceflight program — the Apollo 1 fire — that form the basis of the observance. Bridenstine and others are remembering the Apollo crew on social media.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of January 27-February 2, 2019 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate will be in session at least part of the week.
Within the past hour, the House and Senate passed a Continuing Resolution (CR) to reopen NASA, NOAA and other agencies and departments that have been shut down since December 21, 2018. It now must be signed by President Trump, who said today that he will do so. It is only for three weeks, however, expiring on February 15. In announcing the deal with Congress, Trump threatened to shut the government down again at that point if Democrats do not agree on a border security plan that meets his demands. UPDATE, Jan. 25, 2019: Trump signed the bill this evening.