House and Senate stay in recess ahead of NASA’s Oct. 26 Town Hall

The U.S. House and Senate remained in recess on Oct. 25, 2026, with only pro forma sessions scheduled, pausing work on NASA authorization and appropriations until after the midterm elections.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate will hold a virtual town hall on Oct. 26, 2026, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm ET to introduce Competition Model 2.0, which prioritizes science merit over early-stage engineering plans, cost estimates, and implementation details. The session is open to the public, with the connection link in Associate Administrator Nicky Fox’s blog post, and Fox and other NASA science leaders will present the new vision. Fox said Oct. 25 that the model addresses contract management challenges, funding unpredictability, and other burdens that have prolonged mission concept approvals, describing the approach as “starts from a simple idea: compete on the science first.”

The American Astronomical Society’s Division on Planetary Sciences meeting opened in Spokane, Washington, on Oct. 25, 2026, and runs through Oct. 30, with discoveries, awards, and a plenary talk by Barbara Cohen of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on The Science of Artemis. Casey Dreier and Jack Kiraly of The Planetary Society received the 2026 DPS Masursky Award on Oct. 25 for advocacy against deep Trump Administration cuts to NASA science for FY2026, an effort they are repeating for FY2027.

NASA ended financial support for all Assessment and Analysis Groups, yet groups continue operating, including the Small Bodies Assessment Group, which meets in hybrid form on Oct. 29 from 2:45 to 3:45 pm ET during the Spokane conference. None of the 12 FY2027 appropriations bills had cleared Congress as of Oct. 25, 2026.

The Von Braun Space Exploration Symposium opens Oct. 26, 2026, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, centering on Accelerating Exploration and the Artemis program. Blue Origin and SpaceX will take part in an Artemis III and Beyond panel on lunar lander development, with orbital tests planned for 2027 and astronaut landings planned for 2028. The symposium’s Washington Update features Allen Cutler of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration and Susan Nelson of IBEX2 Solutions. The symposium offers a paid virtual registration option, and agenda times run in Central Time.

NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 10001 for 8.5 minutes, or 500 seconds, at 111 percent power on Oct. 21, 2026, at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, matching the duration and thrust required for Space Launch System launches supporting Artemis missions. The developmental engine is not flight-ready, but the test gives NASA and prime contractor L3Harris Technologies data to improve performance and reliability, and four engines together produce as much as two million pounds of thrust for each Artemis launch.

The FCC holds an open meeting on Oct. 29 at 45 L St., NE, in Washington, DC, with online access. Space News and Vantor host a virtual session on artificial and satellite intelligence for geospatial intelligence at 1:00 pm ET on Oct. 29, and the Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space meets in Washington on Oct. 29.

Silicon Valley Space Week runs Oct. 27, 2026, near NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, with Satellite Innovation and the Milsat Symposium held at the same site. The 4th Defence in Space Conference takes place in London, UK, on Oct. 27.

Space Tech Expo Europe will run Nov. 17 to 19, 2026, in Bremen, with 14,000 attendees, 1,100 exhibitors, and 150 speakers from organizations including NASA, ESA, the European Commission, EUSPA, DLR, CNES, ASI, and JAXA. The expo will move to Frankfurt in 2027 to accommodate growth, and its 2026 program includes four speaker theaters on industry, small satellites, connectivity, and technology. Exhibitors include ArianeGroup, Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space, OHB, Isar Aerospace, Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, Open Cosmos, ICEYE, Space Inventor, Exolaunch, and D-Orbit.

SatVu launched its HotSat-3 thermal imaging satellite on Oct. 1, 2026, aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, doubling the British company’s operational thermal imaging capacity. The satellite carries Leonardo UK’s SuperHawk infrared detector, which images radiated thermal energy from rooftops, walls, pipelines, and ventilation ducts around the clock regardless of daylight. HotSat-3 is the third satellite in SatVu’s commercial fleet, following HotSat-1 in 2023 and HotSat-2 in March 2026. Earlier campaigns tracked refining in Cuba, petroleum centers in India, and liquefied natural gas plants in Australia.

The United States returns to Standard Time on Nov. 1, 2026, at 2:00 am, so the Oct. 25-Nov. 1 listing includes Nov. 1 ahead of the next SpacePolicyOnline.com edition. For that week, the United Kingdom is four hours ahead of Eastern Time and Central Europe is five hours ahead, a one-hour narrowing caused by Europe’s earlier return to Standard Time.