Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of January 11-17, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
During the Week
One big event this week is the splashdown of Crew-11, which is ending its stay aboard the International Space Station early due to a “medical concern” about one of the crew members. Another big event might be Senate passage of the bill that funds NASA for FY2026.
Crew-11, L-R: Oleg Platonov (Roscosmos), Mike Fincke (NASA), Kimiya Yui (JAXA), Zena Cardman (NASA).
Starting with Crew-11, undocking from the ISS is scheduled for 5:00 pm ET on Wednesday, with splashdown off the coast of California — where all Crew and Cargo Dragons return now — on Thursday morning at 3:40 am ET.
NASA decided this past Thursday to bring Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov home about a month early due to a medical issue one of them is experiencing. Fincke is currently Commander of the ISS. The routine Change-of-Command ceremony where he’ll turn the symbolic key over to his successor, cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, is tomorrow (Monday) at 2:35 pm ET. Watch on NASA+, Amazon Prime, or NASA’s YouTube channel.
For privacy reasons the agency declines to say who is ill and what the problem is, but top NASA officials are stressing this is not an emergency, but rather a prudent medical evacuation so the individual can get a proper diagnosis and treatment on the ground. NASA Chief Health and Medical Officer JD Polk said they’ve dealt with many medical issues with onboard equipment and medications over the 25 years the ISS has been permanently occupied, but it’s not equipped with whatever is needed in this case. Polk said several times the astronaut’s condition is stable. This is a first for NASA, but not the first time someone in space had to come home early for medical reasons. Russia has been operating space stations much longer than the United States and at least three Russian cosmonauts reportedly were brought home sooner than planned for medical reasons from the Salyut 5 space station in 1976, from Salyut 7 in 1985, and from Mir in 1987.
Soyuz MS-28 crew, L-R: Sergei Mikaev (Roscosmos), Sergey Kud-Sverchkov (Roscosmos), Chris Williams (NASA).
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman pointed out that Crew-11 is near the end of its tour of duty anyway so it was an easy decision to bring them home a few weeks early. Their replacements on Crew-12 are getting ready for launch in mid-February and NASA may be able to move that up a bit. NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who is part of the Soyuz MS-28 crew, will hold the fort until Crew-12 arrives with help from his two Russian crewmates, Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, and a network of ground support teams around the world. We’ll post whatever information we get about Crew-12’s launch date when we get it. (NASA spells Sergey and Sergei’s names as we show them here, so we’re following their lead.)
Moving on to NASA appropriations, the House passed the FY2026 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill on Thursday after the House and Senate appropriations committee released a compromise final bill on Monday. CJS funds NOAA and NSF as well. NASA gets $24.4 billion, slightly less than the $24.8 billion it had for FY2025, but much, much more than the $18.8 billion the Trump Administration requested. The House and Senate committees had made clear in their separate markups they’d reject the Administration’s proposed cuts. This final bill drives home the message that NASA’s activities across the board — not just the Moon-to-Mars human exploration program, but science, technology, aeronautics and ISS operations — have strong bipartisan support from Congress as a whole.
The bill, H.R. 6938, still has to pass the Senate and be signed by the President, however, so it’s too early to heave a sigh of relief. CJS was combined with the Energy-Water and Interior-Environment bills into a “minibus” and objections to anything in any of those bills could derail the effort. (When all 12 appropriations bills are combined together they are called an omnibus. When they are separated into smaller packages, each is called a minibus.) In the House, for example, some Republicans objected to a few Democratic earmarks in the CJS bill and arranged for the bill to be considered in a manner that the CJS bill might have been extracted from the minibus. Only 47 Republicans voted in favor of separating it, not nearly enough (that vote was 375-47), but it demonstrates how a single issue can pose a danger to a carefully crafted compromise.
That being said, the outlook for NASA certainly is more promising than just a week ago. The House vote for final passage of the minibus was a strongly bipartisan 397-28.
Source: Clerk of the House
If the minibus does become law, six of the 12 FY2026 appropriations bills will have made it through the process. The other six, including Defense, are still in work. Whether they could get done before the CR expires on January 30 is another question. This afternoon (Sunday), another minibus was released with two more bills — Financial Services- General Government (FSGG, which includes the FCC), and National Security-State Department (formerly State-Foreign Ops) — so the appropriators at least are pressing forward.The House is scheduled to be in session for 8 more days this month (January 12-15, January 20-23) and the Senate for 10 (January 12-16, January 26-30). As we say so often, anything can happen in Congress.
On the national security space front, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will visit SpaceX’s Brownsville, TX facility tomorrow (Monday). The press release says he will deliver remarks “to the workforce and leaders at SpaceX, alongside its founder, Elon Musk” but doesn’t mention the time. We’ll add this to our Calendar if/when we get more information. (Hegseth will also visit Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, but that’s where they produce aircraft, not spacecraft, so outside the purview of this website.)
Elsewhere, AIAA will hold its annual week-long Sci-Tech Forum in Orlando, FL beginning tomorrow. The theme is “Breaking Barriers Together: Boundless Discovery” and as usual has a splendid selection of plenary sessions, lectures, Forum 360 discussions, and technical sessions. Axiom Space (and former NASA) astronaut Peggy Whitson kicks it off tomorrow morning.
NASA Planetary Science Division Director Louise Procktor will speak at SBAG on Tuesday.
NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) meets in Baltimore, MD on Tuesday and Wednesday. NASA SMD Planetary Science Division Director Louise Procktor and Acting Planetary Defense Officer Kelly Fast are the opening speakers on Tuesday. Procktor and several other Headquarters officials spoke at the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) meeting last week. They were able to be there in person instead of providing pre-recorded video messages as happened last year while the agency was striving to ensure it adhered to the many Executive Orders coming out of the White House. Hopefully that’s true this week, too.
SBAG will have sessions on the 3I/ATLAS interstellar comet, as well as ongoing and upcoming NASA and international planetary missions. Updates on two missions that will study the Apophis asteroid as it makes a close flyby of Earth in April 2029 are on Wednesday morning: Europe’s RAMSES that will study Apophis before it gets here and NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX (an extension of the OSIRIS-REx mission) that will catch up with and orbit it afterwards. Amy Mainzer will give an update on NEO Surveyor that morning, too. A virtual option is available.
The National Academies will have two meetings of interest this week. Tomorrow and Tuesday, the Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space will meet at the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA to hear from NASA representatives who couldn’t participate in the October 27-29 meeting because of the shutdown. On Friday afternoon, the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics meets virtually to get updates from NASA Astrophysics Division Director Shawn Domagal-Goldman and DOE Cosmic Frontier Program Manager Kathy Turner. In both cases, some portions are open and some are closed. Open portions will be livestreamed.
One last event we’ll highlight is a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing on Tuesday. “From Orbit to Operations: How Weather Satellites Support the National Security Mission” features Irene Parker from NOAA, Col. Bruan Mundhenk from the U.S. Air Force, and Christopher Ekstrom from the U.S. Navy. The hearing will be webcast.
Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are shown below. Check back throughout the week for others we learn about later and add to our Calendar or changes to these.
Monday, January 12
Monday-Tuesday, January 12-13
Monday-Friday, January 12-16
Tuesday, January 13
Tuesday-Wednesday, January 13-14
Wednesday, January 14
Wednesday-Thursday, January 14-15
Wednesday
3:00 pm ET, hatch closure coverage begins
3:30 pm ET, hatch closure
4:45 pm ET, undocking coverage begins
5:00 pm ET, undocking
Thursday
2:15 am ET, return coverage begins
2:50 am ET, deorbit burn
3:40 am ET, splashdown
5:45 am ET, return to Earth media news conference
Friday, January 16
Last Updated: Jan 11, 2026 6:21 pm ET