Here’s SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of October 2-8, 2022 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess, except for pro forma sessions.
During the week
An update from last week What is happening: Congress has passed and the President has signed into law this permanent resolution keeping the government funded until December 16th. So everyone is good to go beyond the November elections. What happens after that will largely be determined by whether voters decide to change control of the House and/or Senate when the 118th Congress begins on January 3, 2023.
For now, both chambers are on vacation except for pro forma sessions until mid-November with one exception. The Senate will return to session next week for a day, Oct. 11, to formally debate the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (NDAA). The NDAA is a “must-have” bill and some senators wanted it to clear the Senate before the election so negotiations with the House could begin on the final version. It wasn’t supposed to be, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will at least take things a step further in the process. The House passed his version in July.
Apart from that, no chamber will meet for legislative business until November 14.
Coincidentally, this is also the opening of the window when NASA plans to attempt the launch of Artemis I again. The November launch window is November 14-27. There’s a lot going on at NASA before that, though.
This week is the launch of Crew-5 to the International Space Station. Delayed a few days by Hurricane Ian, it is now set for October 5 at 12:00 p.m. ET with mooring the next day. The four-person crew includes Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. This is the first flight by a Russian on an American spacecraft since November 2002, just before the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003. Russians regularly flew on the Space Shuttle before that in exchange for Americans flying on the Soyuz spacecraft. After Columbia, the Russians did not fly the shuttle, and NASA paid Russia to ferry astronauts back and forth to the ISS on Soyuz. With SpaceX’s Crew Dragon now available, the two countries have reverted to the model of swapping crew or swapping seats with no exchange of funds.
NASA’s Frank Rubio launched on Soyuz MS-22 a week and a half ago and Kikina, the only woman in the Roscosmos Cosmonaut Corps, is on Crew-5. She and fellow Crew-5 members Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada of NASA and Koichi Wakata of JAXA arrived at Kennedy Space Center yesterday. NASA will hold a media conference call tomorrow (Monday) following the launch readiness review at approximately 7:30 p.m. ET which will air on NASA Live. NASA TV will provide continuous coverage of the launch via docking October 5-6. As dark as Earth’s geopolitical relationship is, the ISS continues to be a haven for cooperation.
Government astronauts like these four aren’t the only ones going to space these days. Billionaire Jared Isaacman was the first person to command a crew made up entirely of private citizens on Inspiration4 last year. He paid for them all to spend three days in orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. He really caught the spaceflight bug and in February signed a deal for three more SpaceX flights, two on Crew Dragon and one on Starship’s first crewed flight.
It may be using these Crew Dragon flights to dock with the Hubble Space Telescope and increase its orbit to allow for many years of scientific observations. NASA, SpaceX and Isaacman announced on Thursday that they were conducting a study to assess the feasibility of visiting Hubble, stressing again and again that it was only a study at this stage. This is at no cost to NASA.
Tomorrow (Monday), Isaacman will join The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport for a perfectly timed episode of Washington Post Live to discuss Isaacman’s partnership with SpaceX and the future of commercial space exploration. It looks like an event not to be missed. Isaacman’s next flight, Polaris Dawn, is already planned and gearing up to launch early next year, so it would be the second of the Crew Dragon flights if that happens.
Between Isaacman’s interview on Monday and the launch of Crew-5 on Wednesday, the world will celebrate the 65th anniversary of the start of the space age. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The United Nations marks this milestone and another 10 years later, on October 10, 1967, when the United Nations Outer Space Treaty entered into force, as World Space Week. Events around the world are taking place October 4-10 to celebrate. This year’s theme is “Space and Sustainability”. The Space Foundation is one of the organizations planning events this year, including its monthly “Space Matters” webinar on Thursday. The World Space Week website lists many of the 1,686 events registered in 95 countries.
We don’t know if the timing was intentional or not, but two other interesting events happen on this day. NASA and NOAA are preparing to launch the next polar-orbiting weather satellite, Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) on November 1. They will have a press conference to preview the launch.
And Bobby Braun, Space Exploration Sector Leader at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will present the prestigious Yvonne C. Brill 2022 Lecture that afternoon at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in Washington, DC. Sponsored by NAE and AIAA, the speaker position was created to honor Yvonne Brill, a distinguished aerospace engineer who passed away in 2013. Braun is himself a distinguished aerospace engineer with an impressive career at Georgia Tech, NASA, University of Colorado Boulder, JPL and now APL. Its subject is: “Are we alone? : The great challenges of the exploration of the solar system. The conference is free, open to the public and will be webcast.
For those not covering the Crew-5 launch on Wednesday, National Space Council Executive Secretary Chirag Parikh will make remarks at a Space Affairs Roundtable luncheon in Washington at the same time ( an unfortunate result of changing launch dates). His comments will be followed by a discussion “with space workforce policy officials from the National Space Council, the Department of Labor and the Department of Education on priorities and actions being taken to strengthen the space workforce and discuss how government and industry can better partner on these efforts.”
For planetary scientists, the big event this week is the DPS meeting taking place in Canada this year. The annual gathering of the Planetary Science Division of the American Astronomical Society is where the latest discoveries in planetary science are revealed and/or discussed. A virtual option is available. There are far too many great sessions to summarize here, but it looks like it’s going to be another great year.
These and other events we are aware of on Sunday morning are listed below. Check back throughout the week for more that we’ll learn about later and add to our schedule or make changes to these.
Sunday to Friday, October 2 to 7
monday october 3
Monday to Friday, October 3 to 7
tuesday october 4
From Tuesday 4 October to Monday 10 October
Wednesday, October 5
Wednesday-Thursday, October 5-6
- Launch and docking of Crew-5, continuous NASA TV coverage begins Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. ET
- WednesdayOctober 5
- ThursdayOctober 6
- Docking, ISS, Earth Orbit, 4:57 p.m. ET
- Hatch opens, 6:43 p.m. ET
- Welcome Ceremony, 8:15 p.m. ET
Thursday, October 6
Last Updated: October 2, 2022 3:46 PM ET
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