Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of December 2-8, 2018 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate will be in session for at least part of the week.
Today NASA revealed the nine companies it has selected to compete to take NASA payloads to the surface of the Moon. NASA wants to purchase services rather than develop and launch its own spacecraft as part of the human exploration plan to explore and utilize the Moon. The companies now are eligible to compete for a combined total of $2.6 billion in task orders over the next 10 years. NASA hopes the first of these small landers will be launched in 2019 or 2020 and continue on a two-per-year basis.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said today that the recently announced safety review of the two commercial crew contractors was his decision. In a meeting with reporters, he explained that investigations of past fatal human spaceflights cited workplace culture as a contributing cause and he wants to get ahead of the issue before crews launch on the Boeing and SpaceX systems, not after something goes wrong. While SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s recent behavior was “not helpful,” he would have ordered the safety review anyway.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine announced today the names of the co-chairs of the Astro 2020 Decadal Survey: Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology and Robert Kennicutt, Jr. of the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University. The study is just getting underway and is expected to be completed in 2020.
Here are SpacePolicyOnline.com’s tidbits for November 27, 2018: Janet Karika is new NASA Chief of Staff; final 2018 Senate race decided; Japan to form space unit in Self-Defense Forces. Be sure to check our website for feature stories and follow us on Twitter (@SpcPlcyOnline) for more news and live tweeting of events.
Just after 10:00 pm ET, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed that the solar panels on its Mars InSight lander had deployed and the batteries were charging. The good news, almost 7 hours after the landing, was accompanied by a second photo of InSight’s landing site. This one was taken from a second camera whose lens was not covered in dust, so provides a much better look at the landscape. A little earlier in the day, JPL also released an image that was taken by one of the two MarCO cubesats as it passed Mars, further demonstrating the utility of these tiny satellites for interplanetary studies.
NASA’s InSight probe successfully landed on Mars as planned today after a nearly 7-month journey. Two tiny cubesats called MarCO-A and MARCO-B worked perfectly to relay signals, including InSight’s first post-landing photo, back to Earth. It will be a few hours before NASA has confirmation that the solar panels, which provide electricity for the spacecraft’s systems, deployed correctly, but so far the mission is proceeding flawlessly.
NASA’s Mars InSight probe will land on the Red Planet tomorrow, November 26, about 3:00 pm ET. It carries instruments that will give scientists their first data on the interior of Mars — its core, crust and mantle. The probe is accompanied by two tiny spacecraft called cubesats that will relay data back to Earth during InSight’s entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence. This is the first time cubesats have been sent into deep space. NASA is optimistic they will work properly and spacecraft controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will quickly know if InSight landed safety. If not, it could take several hours to confirm InSight’s status using signals relayed through other spacecraft.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of November 25-December 1, 2018 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
The new NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Regulatory and Policy Committee (RPC) met for the first time last Friday, adopting a number of “observations, findings, and recommendations” (OFRs) that will be considered by the full NAC at its meeting in December. The committee, composed primarily of industry representatives, approved OFRs spanning topics from export controls to advertising to planetary protection. If approved by NAC, they will be forwarded to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who created RPC shortly after taking office.