NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said the agency has made strides in implementing key aspects of its Space Sustainability Strategy, including the development of a “widely accepted framework” for the assessment of space sustainability, SpaceNews reported Sunday.

In April, NASA issued the strategy’s first volume, which is focused on Earth orbit.

“Since April, we’ve been surveying recent frameworks. We’ve been gathering and collecting information on metrics and models,” Melroy, a previous Wash100 awardee, said during her speech at a summit Friday in Tokyo.

According to the deputy administrator, NASA expects to release a draft of the framework in November.

Melroy said the agency has been working on interagency and international coordination efforts to meet the strategy’s other goals and named Trudy Kortes, an official within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, as interim director of space sustainability.

“She’s just going to help take those initial steps while we’re going through a very broad search,” Melroy said of Kortes.

The U.S. Space Force has named Air Marshal Paul Godfrey as assistant chief of space operations for future concepts and partnerships.

Godfrey assumed the role on June 17 after spending three years as the inaugural commander of the U.K. Royal Air Force’s Space Command, the Space Force said Friday.

In his new role, he will advise Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, in establishing international partnerships to achieve space superiority and resilience.

“Partnerships allow us to build trust, share information and truly integrate operations to maximize resilience and defend against aggressive behavior,” said Godfrey.

According to Saltzman, Godfrey’s appointment will promote closer cooperation with the United Kingdom, noting that international allies are critical force multipliers that boost Space Force’s resilience and competitive advantage.

Before becoming the U.K. Space Command commander, Godfrey served in the Middle East within the U.S. Air Force’s Combined Air and Space Operations Center.

He was also the head of Carrier Enabled Power Projection for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence and the station commander of RAF Lossiemouth.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has unveiled an 11-inch hybrid rocket motor testbed that works to enable more rapid, low-cost hot-fire tests of propellants, composite materials and rocket engine components.

Benefits of the New Testbed

The result of a project that began in 2020, the hybrid testbed serves as a third option to the Marshall team’s existing 24-inch testbed, whose use may be too costly for some organizations, and conventional six-inch testbeds, which offer limited configurations, according to a news article posted Friday on the NASA website.

Chloe Bower, the subscale solid rocket motor manufacturing lead at Marshall, said the hybrid testbed addresses the requirement of partners for cost-efficiency and configurability and offers the ability to simultaneously accomplish multiple test objectives.

Technical Features

The hybrid testbed’s features include variable flow capability, a 20-second continuous burn duration and, most notably, an on-off switch.

“With a solid propulsion system, once it’s ignited, it will burn until the fuel is spent. But because there’s no oxidizer in hybrid fuel, we can simply turn it off at any point if we see anomalies or need to fine-tune a test element, yielding more accurate test results that precisely meet customer needs,” explained Precious Mitchell, the project’s solid propulsion design lead.

Testing of the hybrid testbed was conducted in June. Final data is expected to be turned over to NASA leadership later in the summer.