Here is our list of space policy events for the week of September 26-30, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.

During the Week

It’s quite a week coming up!

For the country: the first of the three presidential debates is tomorrow (Monday) and Congress hopefully will pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government operating after Friday when fiscal year 2016 ends. The House and Senate are still working on the details of their separate versions of the CR, but they have five days left. Typically they leave appropriations deals to the last minute with the expectation that a hard deadline makes people more willing to compromise. The alternative is a government shutdown, which is not an appealing prospect in an election year. Word is the CR will keep the government open through December 9, by which time Congress must pass either another CR or, better yet, the actual FY2017 appropriations measures. Typically Congress combines all 12 regular appropriations bills into a single “omnibus” measure, but House Speaker Paul Ryan reportedly would prefer several smaller “minibuses” dealing with two or three of them at a time. The exception may be the Military Construction-Veterans Affairs bill, which the House wants to include in the CR this week. We’ll see if the Senate is willing to go along with that.

For the space policy community: the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) will be held in Guadalajara, Mexico. IAC is the BIG international conference that combines annual meetings of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and the International Institute of Space Law (IISL). IAC will webcast all the plenary sessions. The one that has generated the most buzz is on Tuesday when Elon Musk will lay out his plans for making humanity a multiplanet species. It’s at 1:30 pm local time in Guadalajara, which is on Central Daylight Time. So that’s 2:30 pm Eastern.

Two congressional hearings of note are also scheduled for this week, both on Tuesday (most congressional hearings are webcast on the respective committee’s website). In the morning, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s Space Subcommittee asks “Are We Losing the Space Race to China?” and four witnesses will give their answers: Dennis Shea, chairman of the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission; Mark Stokes from the Project 2049 Institute; Dean Cheng from the Heritage Foundation; and Jim Lewis from CSIS.

That afternoon, the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee will hear from three eminent experts on the topic of “National Security Space: 21st Century Challenges, 20th Century Organization.” The witnesses are John Hamre, former Deputy Secretary of Defense; Adm. James Ellis, Jr. (Ret.), former commander of U.S. Strategic Command; and Marty Faga, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and former President and CEO of the MITRE Corporation. The great advantage of being “former,” of course, is that one can speak freely. Should be especially interesting.

Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are listed below. Check back throughout the week for others that we learn about later and add to our Events of Interest list.

Monday, September 26

Monday-Friday, September 26-30

International Astronautical Congress, Guadalajara, Mexico (plenary sessions will be webcast)

Tuesday, September 27

Tuesday-Wednesday, September 27-28

Wednesday-Friday, September 28-30

Thursday, September 29

Thursday-Friday, September 29-30

NASA Advisory Council Planetary Science Subcommittee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC

Correction: An earlier edition of this article listed the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA as the location of the National Academies Workshop Planning Committee meeting on September 27-28. It will be held in Washington, DC, not at Beckman. The workshop itself, scheduled for December 5-6, will be held at Beckman.

