Major Space Policy Announcement April 15

During a NASA Telecon briefing yesterday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden was asked about the presidential space conference scheduled for a week from today in Florida (presumably at KSC). “It is a work in progress,” he said. There are several goals for the event, Bolden added, starting with giving President Obama the opportunity “to continue to conversation he has been having with members of Congress”; this will include some “private moments” with members of Congress who will be at the event. Obama will then give a “major space policy speech” that, Bolden said, is designed to try and convince people “that he is dedicated to exploration and to human spaceflight.” That will be followed by several breakout panels (he later said four) on programs in the budget proposal, reports Space Politics.

But who will be there? Bolden confirmed the event is by invitation only, but exactly who has been invited (or even if there have been formal invitations sent out yet) isn’t clear. “I’m not the writer of the guest list,” Bolden said, but expected that it would include members of Congress and the media. In addition, he said, “there will be people who are involved in future concepts, whether they are commercial spaceflight developers, scientists, engineers, representatives of academia”: what he called “a broad cross-section of people” to offer diverse viewpoints. “We’ll try to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time in the panels.”