Right here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s checklist of house coverage occasions for the week of Might 5-11, 2024 and any perception we will provide about them. The Home and Senate are in session this week.
Throughout the Week
The launch of Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Take a look at (CFT) tomorrow (Monday) is hands-down the BIG EVENT this week. However there’s plenty of different great things happening, too, together with the annual People to Mars Summit and the primary assembly of the NASA Advisory Council in virtually a yr and a half.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will lastly get an opportunity to check fly Boeing’s Starliner industrial crew automobile tomorrow if all goes in line with plan. Admittedly not a lot has gone in line with plan for Starliner over the previous 4 years, however hopefully tomorrow will flip the tide.
If this Crew Flight Take a look at goes nicely, NASA’s can be very near attaining the purpose it set in 2014 of getting two programs for getting astronauts to and from the Worldwide Area Station — “dissimilar redundancy” — so if one must be grounded for any purpose, the US may have its personal different. For the 9 years (2011-2020) between the tip of the house shuttle program and the supply of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, NASA was depending on Russia for crew transportation. The USA and Russia have been on good phrases again then, nevertheless it was costly and undermined the picture of the U.S. because the chief in house exploration. It additionally meant Russia’s Soyuz was the one approach to get there — a possible single level failure. Happily, that by no means occurred, however having a number of transportation programs positively is a profit.
Launch is at 10:34 pm ET tomorrow evening. Climate on the launch web site appears wonderful — 95 % favorable. We haven’t heard a particular forecast for the ascent hall up alongside the East Coast and over in direction of Eire which additionally must be good, however we additionally haven’t heard any considerations raised about it. A post-launch information convention is scheduled for midnight, docking can be simply over 24 hours later at 12:48 am ET Wednesday, adopted by hatch opening, an in-orbit welcome ceremony, and a post-arrival press convention at JSC at 4:15 am ET. They’re launching on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket, the primary time people have launched on an Atlas because the Mercury-Atlas program of the early Sixties.
It’ll be onerous to high that this week, however the People to Mars (H2M) summit on Tuesday and Wednesday at George Washington (GW) College in Washington, DC appears actually good, too. NASA stresses that the Moon is a stepping stone to placing people on Mars and the Artemis lunar program figures prominently on this convention.
NASA Affiliate Administrator Jim Free, Artemis Mission Supervisor Mike Sarafin, Area Expertise Mission Directorate Deputy Affiliate Administrator Prasun Desai, and Science Mission Directorate Planetary Science Division Director Lori Glaze are among the many NASA VIPs on the agenda. A panel on “When Will China Ship People to the Moon and Mars” options Dean Cheng with the U.S. Institute of Peace (previously with the Heritage Basis), Kevin Pollpeter from the Middle for Naval Analyses, Kristin Burke from the China Aerospace Research Institute, and Scott Tempo, Director of the Area Coverage Institute at GW (previously Government Secretary of the White Home Nationwide Area Council within the Trump Administration). Masami Onoda, Director of JAXA’s Washington Workplace, will discuss in regards to the pressurized rover Japan is constructing for the Artemis program after which take part in a panel on “Moon2Mars–Integrating NASA and Companions” with representatives from NASA, ESA, the United Arab Emirates, and Redwire. That’s only a snapshot. The convention appears terrific.
The NASA Advisory Council (NAC) is assembly Wednesday and Thursday at NASA HQ in Washington, DC, however the public might take part solely via WebEx. An in depth agenda exhibiting who can be talking will not be on the NAC web site as of at the moment (Sunday). It solely has an inventory of matters. However it needs to be attention-grabbing if solely as a result of they haven’t met since January 2023. The NAC subcommittees have been making findings and suggestions within the interim, however they should be permitted by the total NAC earlier than going to NASA administration, so haven’t made any progress in all this time. Additionally, the checklist of NAC members on the NAC web site is from June 2022, virtually two years in the past! We all know Wayne Hale stepped down final yr. We don’t know what different adjustments have occured, however so far as we all know Les Lyles remains to be chair.
Many different attention-grabbing occasions are on faucet together with congressional hearings on the FY2025 price range requests for DOD, the Division of Commerce, and the Federal Communications Fee; the annual GEOINT convention on geospatial intelligence in Kissimmee, FL; the annual Astrobiology Science Convention (AbSciCon) in Windfall, RI; and the annual Nuclear and Rising Applied sciences for Area (NETS) convention in Santa Fe, NM.
These and different occasions we find out about as of Sunday morning are proven beneath. Verify again all through the week for others we find out about later and add to our Calendar or adjustments to those.
Sunday-Wednesday, Might 5-8
Sunday-Friday, Might 5-10
Monday, Might 6
Monday-Friday, Might 6-10
Tuesday, Might 7
Tuesday-Wednesday, Might 7-8
Tuesday-Thursday, Might 7-9
Wednesday, Might 8
Wednesday-Thursday, Might 8-9
Wednesday-Friday, Might 8-10
Friday, Might 10
