The United Launch Alliance will not wait for Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft to be ready before launching the second certification mission of its new Vulcan rocket. Instead it will launch a mass simulator and use the “Cert-2” flight to test the capabilities of the new Centaur V upper stage. Cert-2 must be successfully accomplished before Vulcan can be used for national security space launches, two of which need to lift off before the end of the year.

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A new NOAA weather satellite lifted off from Kennedy Space Center this evening enroute to geostationary orbit above the equator. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-U, or GOES-U, is the fourth and last in a series of advanced meteorological satellites that provide greatly improved data over their predecessors. This one has an added feature — a coronagraph to help monitor the Sun and warn of solar storms.

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China’s Chang’e-6 sample return canister landed in Inner Mongolia today, bringing back samples from the far side of the Moon for the first time in history. The farside always faces away from Earth and nothing was known about it until the Space Age began in 1957 and Soviet and American spacecraft began sending back grainy images. Those images improved considerably over the decades and show that it’s very different from the nearside. Scientists are eager to learn why and now will be able to study actual samples.

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The House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee that funds NASA released its proposals for FY2025 this morning, a day prior to when it will formally mark up the bill. Only top-line numbers are available now, but the news is not good for NASA’s science and STEM programs. NASA’s science portfolio is already coping with significant cuts in FY2024 compared to what it expected and once again bears the brunt for FY2025.

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For the second time in a row, NASA had to scrub a spacewalk today.  In this case, water began leaking from NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit as she and Mike Barratt were about to step out of the International Space Station’s Quest airlock into space. They were still in the airlock and could close the hatch and reattach to ISS systems relatively quickly. NASA insists they were not in danger because of the leak.

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Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of June 23-29, 2024 and any insight we can offer about them. The House is in session this week. The Senate is in recess except for pro forma sessions.

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Late today NASA said it is again delaying the return of the Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test. Unlike the earlier schedule changes, no new date was announced. NASA and Boeing said only they are “adjusting” the return date until after two spacewalks on the International Space Station are completed on July 2. That will allow time for further reviews of Starliner’s propulsion system.

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In a blistering speech, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee criticized the Biden Administration’s refusal to declassify more information about Russia’s plans to place a nuclear weapon in orbit. Calling the moment such a satellite is placed in orbit “Day Zero” and the end of the Space Age because no one could ever again count on their satellites functioning, Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) insisted Biden do more to ensure that Russia abides by the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty that bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction from orbit.

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NASA and other U.S. and international agencies participated in a tabletop exercise in April to work through how they might effectively respond to a potential asteroid threat. This fifth planetary defense tabletop exercise, or TTX-5, postulated a threat 14 years from now and discovered quite a few gaps. International participation was a key aspect of TTX-5 and figuring out the process for making decisions both domestically and internationally is one of them.

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Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are getting another four days on the International Space Station. Their return to Earth and the end of Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test has been reset for June 26 as Boeing and NASA continue to perform spacecraft tests that can only be done on-orbit. NASA also has rearranged the ISS spacewalk schedule after scrubbing a planned outing at the last minute a few days ago.

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