Here is 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 of Representatives and Senate are on recess except for pro forma sessions.
During the week
An update from last week What’s happening: Congress passed and the President signed legislation stating the government will be funded until December 16. So everyone is ready to weather the November elections. What happens after that will depend largely on whether voters decide that control of the House and/or Senate should change when the 118th Congress begins on Jan. 3, 2023.
With one exception, both chambers are on breaks for the time being, with the exception of pro forma meetings until mid-November. The Senate will reconvene for one day next week, Oct. 11, to officially debate the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA bill needs to be passed, and some senators wanted the Senate to clear it before the election so negotiations with the House of Representatives on the final text could begin. It shouldn’t be, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will at least take it one step further in this process. The House passed its version in July.
Apart from that, both chambers will not meet for legislative business until November 14th.
Coincidentally, that’s also the opening of the window if NASA plans to retry the Artemis I launch. The November launch period is November 14-27. But before that, there is still a lot going on at NASA.
This week is the launch of Crew-5 to the International Space Station. Delayed by a few days due to Hurricane Ian, it is now scheduled for October 5 at 12:00 p.m. ET with docking the next day. The crew of four includes Roskosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. This is the first flight by a Russian on a US spacecraft since November 2002, just before the Columbia Shuttle accident in 2003. Russians previously routinely flew on the space shuttle in exchange for Americans flying on Soyuz spacecraft. After Columbia, the Russians stopped flying 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 crew-swapping or seat-swapping model without exchanging money.
NASA’s Frank Rubio launched a week and a half ago on Soyuz MS-22 and Kikina, the only woman in the Roscosmos cosmonaut corps, is on Crew-5. She and fellow Crew-5 members, NASA’s Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, and JAXA’s Koichi Wakata, arrived at Kennedy Space Center yesterday. NASA will host a media teleconference to be broadcast on NASA Live tomorrow (Monday) after the launch readiness review at approximately 7:30 p.m. ET. NASA TV will provide continuous coverage of the launch from October 5-6 until docking. As murky as Earth’s geopolitical relations are, the ISS remains a hotbed of collaboration.
Government astronauts like these four aren’t the only ones going into space these days. Billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first to command an all-private crew on Inspiration4 last year. He paid for them to spend all three days in orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. He really caught the spaceflight fever and in February signed a contract for three more SpaceX flights, two with Crew Dragon and one with Starship’s first manned flight.
It may turn out that he will use those Crew Dragon flights to dock with the Hubble Space Telescope and raise its orbit for many more years of scientific observations. NASA, SpaceX and Isaacman announced Thursday that they are conducting a study to assess the feasibility of a visit from Hubble, repeatedly emphasizing that it is only a study at this point. It’s free for NASA.
Tomorrow (Monday), Isaacman will join The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport to talk about Isaacman’s partnership with SpaceX and the future of commercial space exploration in a perfectly timed Washington Post Live episode. Sounds like an event not to be missed. Isaacman’s next flight, Polaris Dawn, is already planned and preparing for launch early next year, so this would be the second of the Crew Dragon flights if it comes to that.
Between Isaacman’s interview on Monday and the launch of the Crew-5 on Wednesday, the world is celebrating the 65th anniversary of the beginning 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 UN Outer Space Treaty took effect as World Space Week. Events around the world are taking place from October 4th to 10th to celebrate. This year’s theme is “Space and Sustainability”. The Space Foundation is one of the organizations planning events this year, including their monthly “Space Matters” webinar on Thursdays. The World Space Week website highlights many of the 1,686 events in 95 registered countries.
We’re not sure if the timing was intentional or not, but there are two other interesting events scheduled for the day. NASA and NOAA are preparing to launch the next polar-orbiting weather satellite, the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2), on November 1. They will hold a media briefing to preview the launch.
And Bobby Braun, head of the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will deliver the renowned Yvonne C. Brill Lecture 2022 at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in Washington, DC this afternoon. Sponsored by the NAE and AIAA, the lectureship was created in honor of Yvonne Brill, a distinguished aerospace engineer who passed away in 2013. Braun is a distinguished aerospace engineer herself with an impressive career at Georgia Tech, NASA, University of Colorado Boulder, JPL and now APL. His topic is: “Are We Alone?: Grand Challenges in Solar System Exploration”. The lecture 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 be making comments at the same time at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon (an unfortunate result of the launch date change). His comments will be followed by a discussion “with political leaders from the space workforce at the National Space Council, Department of Labor and Department of Education on priorities and actions to strengthen the space workforce and discuss how government and industry can better work together in this effort.”
For planetary scientists, the big event this week is the DPS meeting, taking place in Canada this year. At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Department of Planetary Sciences, the latest discoveries in planetary science are unveiled and/or discussed. A virtual option is available. There are far too many interesting sessions to summarize here, but it looks set to be another great year.
These and other events we know of Sunday morning are listed below. Keep checking back throughout the week for others that we’ll hear about later to add or make changes to our calendar.
Sunday-Friday, 2nd-7th October
Monday October 3rd
Monday-Friday, 3rd-7th October
Tuesday October 4th
Tuesday 4th October – Monday 10th October
Wednesday October 5th
Wednesday-Thursday, 5th-6th October
- Crew-5 Launch and Docking, continuous NASA television coverage begins Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. ET
- Wednesday5th October
- ThursdayOctober 6th
- Docking, ISS, Earth Orbit, 4:57 p.m. ET
- Hatch Opening, 6:43 p.m. ET
- Welcome Ceremony, 8:15 p.m. ET
Thursday October 6th
Last Updated: 10/2/2022 3:16 PM ET
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