Tory Bruno, president and CEO of the United Launch Alliance, said today that the Vulcan rocket will be ready to launch by the end of the year. The root cause of a test failure of the Centaur V upper stage has been identified and fixes are underway. A launch date has not been set in part because one of the payloads is a lunar lander that can only be launched on certain days each month.
House and Senate appropriators are moving forward with their FY2024 NASA funding bills. The Senate Appropriations committee approved the Commerce-Justice-Science bill today and the House will mark up their bill at subcommittee level tomorrow. In keeping with the Fiscal Responsibility Act, their totals are about the same as NASA’s current spending level, far less than President Biden’s request. While these are just steps in a lengthy process, they signal the difficult choices that lie ahead.
The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee approved the nominations of three FCC commissioners and the agency’s Inspector General today. The next stop is a confirmation vote by the full Senate, but opposition voiced by some committee members suggests it will not be clear sailing.
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the first science-quality images from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA and its JWST partners released a stunning image of a star-forming region 390 light years away. That is nearby, cosmically speaking, allowing an unobstructed view of the stellar nursery.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of July 9-15, 2023 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
The last launch of Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket went off without a hitch today. Carrying two communications satellites, one for Germany and one for France, it brought to a close an almost-perfect record as Europe waits for its replacement, Ariane 6. The end of the run for Ariane 5 is emblamatic of the changes taking place in the global space launch market overall.
Here are links to all the articles published on SpacePolicyOnline.com during the week of June 26-July 2, 2023, including our “What’s Happening in Space Policy” for this coming week. Click on each title to read the entire article.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the next TWO weeks, July 2-14, 2023 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess this coming week, returning the week of July 10.
ESA’s Euclid spacecraft is on its way to the L2 Lagrange point where it will spend six years collecting data to help scientists understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter — what some call the Dark Universe. Between them, they make up 95 percent of the universe, but scientists do not know any more than that and hope data from Euclid, NASA’s upcoming Roman Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes will provide some answers.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic finally launched its first commercial SpaceShipTwo flight today. Galactic-01 took four Italians and two Americans across the threshold between air and space for a few minutes of weightlessness. Three of the Italians were mission specialists conducting microgravity experiments while the fourth was one of the pilots. The next commercial flight now is planned for August with monthly flights thereafter.