Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of February 8-14, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session this week.
During the Week
The big event this week is the launch of Crew-12 to the International Space Station Wednesday morning. What is usually a routine crew rotation has taken on greater interest in part because the crew they’re replacing, Crew-11, won’t be aboard the ISS to greet them.
Crew of Soyuz MS-28, currently aboard the ISS, L-R: Sergei Mikaev (Roscosmos), Sergey Kud-Sverchkov (Roscosmos), Chris Williams (NASA). NASA spells the cosmonauts’ first names as shown here.
International crews have been rotating on roughly six month schedules for the past 25 years and NASA likes to have a several day handover where the outgoing crew brings the incoming crew up to speed on the status of the ISS and the scientific experiments underway. In this case, however, Crew-11 had to come home early because one of the crew members was ill.
The usual ISS crew complement these days is seven, four who come and go on U.S. SpaceX Crew Dragons and three on Russia’s Soyuz. The U.S. and Russian segments of the ISS are interdependent so one American and one Russian must always be aboard. Consequently every Crew Dragon and Soyuz includes a crew member from the other’s country.
The value of that approach is being demonstrated right now as NASA astronaut Chris Williams is holding the fort on the U.S. segment (with help from his Soyuz MS-28 crewmates) waiting for Crew-12 to join him.
That should happen on Thursday when Commander Jessica Meir (NASA), Pilot Jack Hathaway (NASA), and Mission Specialists Sophie Adenot (ESA/France) and Andrey Fedyaev (Roscosmos) dock. It’s the second flight for Meir and Fedyaev and the first for Hathaway and Adenot. Launch is scheduled for 6:01 am ET on Wednesday and docking on Thursday at 10:30 am ET. NASA, ESA and SpaceX officials will participate in a pre-launch news conference tomorrow (Monday) at 11:00 am ET and a post-launch news conference at 7:30 am ET on Wednesday. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher will participate in the latter.
Crew-12 is scheduled to launch on Wednesday morning. L-R: Andrey Fedyaev (Roscosmos), Jack Hathaway (NASA), Jessica Meir (NASA), Sophie Adenot (ESA/France). Photo credit: SpaceX
Crew-12 originally planned to launch on February 15, but NASA accelerated the date a bit due to Crew-11’s early return. Then it was up in the air because NASA wanted to launch the Artemis II crew around the Moon this month and that had priority. But liquid hydrogen leaks during the Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) delayed Artemis II and Crew-12 got the go-ahead. NASA hasn’t announced a date for a second Artemis II WDR, but they’re now targeting early March for the launch.
Jim Bridenstine will speak at the MSBR luncheon on Wednesday.
Speaking of Artemis, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will address the Maryland Space Business Roundtable on Wednesday. Now Managing Partner of the Artemis Group and a lobbyist, Bridenstine headed NASA in the first Trump Administration when Artemis began. He’s been outspoken recently with concerns that China will put taikonauts on the Moon before American astronauts can get back in large part because the Human Landing Systems are delayed. He was criticized in some quarters for making that point at a Senate hearing last year, but NASA has acknowledged the problem and is looking for solutions.
Up on Capitol Hill this week, the Senate Commerce Committee apparently plans to retry passing several bills that didn’t get approved last week. We say apparently because the meeting isn’t posted on the committee’s website right now, but it is on Congress.gov and the Senate Press Gallery’s website. We’ll update this if we hear differently.
In any case, one of the bills is the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act (SAT Streamlining Act, S. 3639) co-sponsored by committee chair Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT). The goal is to speed up FCC approval of commercial satellite license applications. Satellites need spectrum to communicate with their associated ground stations on Earth. The FCC assigns spectrum to non-government entities. Burgeoning demand from companies proposing ever-larger satellite constellations is stressing the system for approvals for both the satellites and the ground stations. Just before the committee’s meeting last week, for example, SpaceX’s Elon Musk filed plans with the FCC for one million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers.
Under the bill, if the FCC doesn’t act on an application within a given period of time, the application is “deemed granted” — automatically approved. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) wants to amend that language so it applies only to the ground segment, not the satellites. Cruz doesn’t agree. By the time they were ready to vote on her amendment, a quorum no longer was present so the vote had to be postponed. It appears they will try on Wednesday.
Among the other interesting events this week is Friday’s CSIS webinar looking at “Golden Dome One Year In.” It was on January 27, 2025 that President Trump signed an Executive Order initiating what he then called the “Iron Dome for America” program to build a missile defense shield akin to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. Three weeks later on February 15 CSIS had its first webinar on the topic. Iron Dome was renamed Golden Dome, but otherwise remains the same. In May, Gen. Michael Guetlein was appointed to lead the program.
President Trump (seated) with Gen. Michael Guetlein and Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) in the Oval Office as Guetlein is introduced as the head of the Golden Dome project. May 20, 2025. Screenshot from C-SPAN.
Not many details have come out other than announcements of a couple thousand companies and organizations eligible to compete for $151 billion in contracts and lots of talk about space-based interceptors. Will be interesting to hear what CSIS’s experts think about the project’s prospects of meeting Trump’s goal of an operational system by the end of his term in January 2029.
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.
Sunday, February 8
Monday, February 9
Monday-Wednesday, February 9-11
Monday-Friday, February 9-13 (continued from last week)
Tuesday, February 10
Tuesday-Thursday, February 10-12
Tuesday-Friday, February 10-13
Wednesday, February 11
4:00 am ET, launch coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, NASA YouTube
6:01 am ET, launch
7:30 am ET, post-launch press conference (NASA YouTube)
MSBR Luncheon with Jim Bridenstine, Martin’s Crosswinds, Greenbelt, MD, 11:30 am-1:00 pm ET
Senate Commerce Committee Executive Session, S-216 Capitol, 2:00 pm ET (to be confirmed)
Thursday, February 12
8:30 am ET, arrival coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, NASA YouTube
10:30 am ET, docking
12:15 pm ET, hatch opening and welcoming remarks
Friday, February 13
Last Updated: Feb 08, 2026 5:16 pm ET