With only 12 hours remaining in FY2023, the question of whether the government will be fully open tomorrow remains up in the air. Neither the House nor the Senate has passed a Continuing Resolution to provide temporary funding while work continues on the 12 regular appropriations bills. Two efforts in the House failed in recent days and the Senate is still deciding exactly what will be in their bill.
The long simmering feud between the Alabama and Colorado congressional delegations over the location of U.S. Space Command headquarters erupted again today at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) bitterly condemned the process by which President Biden decided to keep it in Colorado instead of moving it to Alabama as promised by then-President Trump. Rogers wants another Inspector General investigation akin to the one the Colorado delegation demanded following the Trump decision two years ago.
The FAA closed its investigation into Blue Origin’s New Shepard-23 launch failure today. The flight carried a variety of scientific payloads but no people when it lifted off just over a year ago. The capsule detached from the rocket as programmed after computers detected a problem and landed safely, but the rocket was destroyed. Blue Origin has not conducted any launches since then.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian colleagues landed in Kazakhstan this morning after 371 days in space, a new record for a U.S. astronaut. The duration was a surprise. They were supposed to come home after six months, but the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft that took them to the International Space Station a year ago lost all its coolant and was deemed unsafe to bring them back. A replacement spacecraft, Soyuz MS-23, was sent up for today’s return, causing a change in the crew rotation schedule and a one-year mission for the trio.
NASA announced today that Charity Weeden is the new Associate Administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy. Weeden is well known in Washington space policy circles, most recently as the head of policy and government relations for Astroscale.
Here are links to all the articles published on SpacePolicyOnline.com in the last two weeks, September 11-24, 2023, including our “What’s Happening in Space Policy” for this coming week. Click on each title to read the entire article.
Seven years after it left Earth, a capsule landed in Utah today delivering the biggest bonanza of pristine asteroid material in the history of the space program. The approximately 250 grams of regolith from the asteroid Bennu took more than two years to make the trip home where scientists are eagerly awaiting the moment when they get to see exactly what’s inside.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of September 24-30, 2023 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate will be in session beginning Tuesday as the clock ticks down to the end of FY2023.
An Independent Review Board assessing the status of the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission has concluded that although the mission has tremendous scientific value, it is poorly managed and designed with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations. The program has a “near zero” probability of meeting the existing launch readiness dates and would cost $8-9.6 billion, requiring more than $1 billion per year for at least three years beginning in FY2025. On the good news front, the IRB suggests alternatives that would still achieve the end result, but later in the 2030s and they may cost more.
Today Frank Rubio becomes the first U.S. astronaut to spend one year in space. Others have come close, but the 365-day mark has been met by only four other humans until now, all Russians. Two more Russians are joining the list along with Rubio, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. The trio arrived on Soyuz MS-22 last year and had to stay an extra six months after that spacecraft suffered a technical failure and had to be replaced, with a resulting change to the crew rotation schedule.