The University of Nebraska College of Law will be hosting a free one-day conference on national space policy on Friday, September 10, at the Newseum in Washington. Keynote speakers include Gen. James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver.

Tuesday morning Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee, will be the featured speaker at a Space Transportation Association (STA) breakfast on Capitol Hill. Certainly the status of a House version of a NASA authorization bill will be a subject of discussion at that event. The STA will also be presenting an award to Gary Payton, the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs, who is retiring this month.

On Wednesday afternoon The Planetary Society is hosting the first in a series of webcasts on NASA’s new space exploration plan. This first webcast, at 5 pm EDT, will focus on destinations in the new plan and will feature Bill Nye and Louis Friedman, the incoming and outgoing executive directors of the organization.

Congressman C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-MD), in a visit to Huntsville, said that he wants a “roadmap” of the country’s long-term goals for space exploration over the next 10-15 years. He appeared concerned that without an aggressive space exploration plan, “it gives a head start to a lot of our competitors, especially the Chinese.” However, as the video accompanying the article reveals, Ruppersberger is not necessarily advocating a complete restoration of Constellation and an increase in NASA spending. “Let’s be perfectly clear: the president canceled the program, so we have to build upon where we are,” he said. “And again, the issue of cost is there, especially in this economy.”

At 2:30 pm this afternoon Space News is hosting a live webcast with NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver titled “NASA’s New Direction: An Update from the Top”.

One difference is that the hearing will coincide with the second day of the two-day NASA Exploration Enterprise Workshop in Galveston, Texas. Today will feature a number of presentations from NASA officials on studies performed to date within NASA on various aspects of the new plan, some of which have already led to the release of RFIs, such as one for commercial crew released on Friday. Today’s sessions will be webcast, and the slides for those presentations are already available.

Later this week the International Space Development Conference, the annual conference of the National Space Society, kicks off in Chicago. Notable speakers include Charles Bolden (the dinner speaker Friday night) and NASA deputy administrator (and former NSS executive director) Lori Garver at Saturday’s luncheon. Jeff Greason will be speaking about “The Augustine Committee and U.S. Space Policy” on Friday as well. Saturday afternoon features what conference organizers are calling, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, “The Great Debate”: after a presentation by Scott Pace of GWU’s Space Policy Institute on the president’s new NASA policy, Rusty Schweickart and Bob Zubrin will debate it, taking the pro and con positions, respectively.

No, it’s not someone protesting NASA’s planned reliance on commercial ventures to transport crews to LEO. It’s one of the handful of protestors that turn up outside the conference site every year, usually protesting military space activities as well as more general military concerns (“Are Nuclear Weapons Legal?” asked one banner.)

The highlight of today is arguably speech this morning by NASA administrator Charles Bolden; there will also be a panel session in the afternoon on the NASA budget featuring deputy administrator Lori Garver. But perhaps the most intriguing thing on the schedule is this event notice sent out to media: “NASA Optimus Prime Announcement”. If the Autobots are working with NASA, the new exploration plan would seem like a shoe-in (not to mention that Transformers probably count as gamechanging technology.) No word if opponents of the new plan have reached out to Megatron.

More letter writing: a letter signed by a number of former astronauts, as well as former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and others, including Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft, criticizes the decision to cancel Constellation and asks the president to “demonstrate the vision and determination necessary to keep our nation at the forefront of human space exploration”. The letter doesn’t dwell on Constellation (indeed, it’s mentioned only once in the letter, in the very first sentence), but instead focuses on the concerns about abandoning human space exploration. “NASA must continue at the frontiers of human space exploration in order to develop the technology and set the standards of excellence that will enable commercial space ventures to eventually succeed. Canceling NASA’s human space operations, after 50 years of unparalleled achievement, makes that objective impossible.”

Also on Monday, Aerospace Industries Association president Marion Blakey called for specific milestones and deadlines in NASA’s new plan in a speech in Florida. “Kennedy didn’t say we’d go to the moon today; he said, ‘this decade’,” she said. “We need clear goals, milestones and dates, the building blocks and metrics of a concrete commitment to human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit.” She also called for a “national space strategy” that would “set out our goals for at least a generation so long-term investments can be made.”

Sunday’s “Save Space” rally in Cocoa, Florida, went off as planned, with as many as 4,000 people attending to hear speeches covering familiar talking points about saving space (or at least saving space jobs in the region). One comment from Florida Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, via the Save Space Twitter account: “we need to go back to the moon by 2015 and to Mars by 2020.” Good luck with that.

As for Thursday’s event, invitations have gone out (some as late as Sunday), so Central Florida News 13 asks, “who’s going?”. Some local officials have gotten invites, but surprisingly, neither Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) nor Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) has gotten one.

The event, expected to take place at or near the Kennedy Space Center, hasn’t been formally announced by the White House (the Sentinel article suggests a formal announcement could come today) (update 11:45 am: the White House has announced it, according to the AP), but Sen. Bill Nelson all but confirmed the event to both papers. Details in general about the event are scant, including the event’s agenda and who will be invited to attend. An unnamed White House official told Florida Today that the conference would include “the implications of the new strategy for Florida, the nation and our ultimate activities in space”.

Nelson, meanwhile, hopes that by the conference the White House and NASA will make several changes to the plan. Nelson told the Sentinel he wants to see one more shuttle flight added to the manifest (although not explaining why only one, instead of several as others in Congress have proposed), a commitment to human exploration of Mars as the plan’s long-term goal, and continued development of a heavy-lift launcher.

The issue about the conference, though, is its timing: Thursday, April 15. That may work well for Florida (other than it’s also the deadline for filing tax returns), and also some in Washington: Nelson tells Florida Today the timing is good since his space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee will vote “on NASA’s budget” in May (a reference, presumably, to an authorization bill). However, it could cause some angst in Colorado Springs, home of the Space Foundation. The 15th happens to be the last day of the National Space Symposium, one of the major annual space conferences in the US. A competing space event with a presidential imprimatur, depending on the specifics of that event, could wreak havoc on attendance and the conference’s agenda. For example, NASA administrator Charles Bolden is scheduled to speak on the afternoon of the 15th according to the latest agenda; that seems unlikely if there’s a space conference featuring the president in Florida at the same time.

However, at least the National Space Symposium will have that day something the Florida conference won’t: Spock.

(I’ll also note that I’ll be appearing on a panel Friday evening at the conference about “Reporting Space”, moderated by ex-CNN space reporter Miles O’Brien.)

On that last point, NASASpaceFlight.com reported this morning that Ride’s group is looking at shuttle extension options that would stretch the current manifest and/or add more missions, and that “draft NASA authorization language is currently being worked on behind the scenes in Congress” for the latest NASA authorization legislation that would appear to endorse an option to extend the shuttle into 2012.

* The meeting was very much an information-gathering meeting, and at times seemed like drinking from a firehose: they went from 9 am to 5 pm with only a short break (originally 30 minutes, but stretched out in practice to more like 45) for lunch. The meeting was a series of presentations, ranging from the status of Constellation to proposals for alternatives, as well as perspectives from the White House (science advisor John Holdren), Congress (Rep. Pete Olson and Sen. Bill Nelson, with submissions read for the record from Rep. Ralph Hall and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison) and international partners (ESA’s Jean-Jacques Dordain and Roskosmos’s Anatoly Perminov).

* If the committee members had any initial opinions about the current status of NASA’s activities, they largely kept them to themselves, instead keeping to asking questions or making some basic concluding comments at the end of the day. Three of the ten committee members – Charles Kennel, Lester Lyles, and Sally Ride – had prior commitments and were not at the meeting.

* The afternoon session was largely devoted to either alternatives to the current Constellation system (EELV, DIRECT, and a shuttle-derived side-mount proposal) and COTS/ISS commercial resupply. A lot of attention in particular was devoted to the DIRECT concept, presented by Stephen Metschan. Depending on your point of view the committee seemed either interested in or skeptical about the idea (I heard both reactions afterwards) although the latter seemed evident in Leroy Chiao’s question to Metschan: “Who are you guys?”

* More interesting than the DIRECT presentation, though (since the merits and demerits of DIRECT have been widely discussed for some time now) was United Launch Alliance’s presentation on EELV alternatives to Ares, perhaps the most detailed public presentation to date by the company on this. Michael Gass, president and CEO of ULA, said that a modified Delta 4 Heavy could launch Orion as early as 2014 with a performance margin in excess of 20%. That would require $800 million for a new pad and $500 million in human-rating work, and then $300 million a launch. He also said Atlas 5 could start commercial crew missions to ISS in 2013 (with another company providing the spacecraft); that would require $400 million in non-recurring costs and then $130 million a launch. Gary Pulliam of the Aerospace Corporation then followed with a summary of their EELV-vs-Ares study previously reported.

* In brief comments early in the day, Holdren reiterated that President Obama is interested in space, noting his conversations with the crews of the last two shuttle missions, adding that Obama would continue the practice in the future. Obama, Holdren said, “is excited by human spaceflight… this is a president who gets it, he understands the importance of space, he understands the importance of human spaceflight.”

* Several people, including Sen. Nelson, said that they believed that the committee has particular power to shape the future of the country’s human spaceflight effort with their recommendations. “In essence, what you decide is going to be the significant influence for the White House, and therefore also for the Congress,” he said in brief remarks just before lunch. However, what the committee will provide is just that: recommendations. Augustine said in a press conference after the meeting that they would provide the White House with a number of options, graded against a set of criteria (risk, cost, capability) they are still developing. Like so many other panels in the past, it will be up to the White House and Congress to turn those recommendations into policies, plans, and legislation. And the historical track record is not necessarily promising.