Here is our list of space policy events for the week of October 9-14, 2016 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in recess until November 14.

During the Week

The week starts tonight (Sunday) with the second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton (D) and Donald Trump (R). Don’t expect the space program to come up at all, but these debates are important elements of the presidential election, the foundation of our democracy. Everyone should be paying attention! This one is a town-hall format at Washington University in St. Louis from 9:00-10:30 pm ET (nationally televised, check local listings).

Tomorrow, October 10, is a Federal holiday (Columbus Day), so government workers, at least, will have a day off to recuperate. This is a holiday that many businesses do NOT observe, however, choosing instead to close on the day after Thanksgiving. So whether you get to sleep in tomorrow or not depends on where you work.

For the space program, this week’s big event is the launch of Orbital ATK’s re-engined Antares rocket on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Launch schedules are always subject to change, but at the moment it is planned for 9:13 pm ET on Thursday night (two pre-launch briefings will take place the day before). Antares launches from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, VA. It is a night launch. Weather permitting, it should be viewable for a good-sized segment of the East Coast. This is the first Antares flight since an October 28, 2014 failure that destroyed that rocket and a Cygnus spacecraft loaded with cargo for ISS. This mission is designated OA-5, for Orbital ATK-5, although it is the sixth operational flight in this series. Orbital ATK names its cargo spacecraft after deceased astronauts. This one is named after Alan Poindexter who died in 2012 from injuries sustained in an accident. He flew on two space shuttle missions (STS-122 as pilot, STS-131 as commander) that delivered modules to the ISS as part of its construction.

Also on Thursday night, Women in Aerospace (WIA) will hold its annual awards dinner in Arlington, VA. Six distinguished women will receive awards — including a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award for Molly Macauley — and Patti Grace Smith, who passed away earlier this year, will also be recognized.

The annual International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS 2016) will be held in Las Cruces, New Mexico on Wednesday and Thursday, with pre- and post-events the prior and following days. The website does not indicate if any of the symposium will be webcast. If we find out that it will be, we’ll post the link in our calendar item about this event. Looks really interesting, so hopefully it will be livestrearmed.

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.

Sunday, October 9

Second Presidential Debate, St. Louis, MO, 9:00-10:30 pm ET (nationally televised, check local listings)

Monday, October 10

U.S. Federal Holiday (Columbus Day) , government offices will be closed

Tuesday, October 11

NASA Advisory Council (NAC) HEO Research Subcommittee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, 9:00 am – 4:30 pm ET (WebEx/telecon)

Wednesday, October 12

NASA OA-5 Pre-Launch Briefings (watch on NASA TV) 1:00 pm ET, science 2:00 pm ET, mission status



Wednesday-Thursday

ISPCS 2016, Las Cruces, NM

Wednesday-Friday

NAS Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB), Beckman Center, Irvine, CA

Thursday, October 13

Friday, October 14