Science News

The chief of NASAs space shuttle program said Tuesday that the agency could technically continue to fly its three aging orbiters beyond their planned 2010 retirement if ordered to do so by President Barack Obama and lawmakers. All it would take would be the extra funding needed to pay for it.

“I think the real issue that the agency and the nation has to address is the expense,” Shannon told reporters in a mission briefing.

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NASA’s space shuttle manager says it wouldn’t be hard to add more shuttle flights. The real question is money.

Right now, the space shuttles are supposed to retire this fall. Four more missions are planned. Some in Congress, though, are pushing for additional flights.

Program manager John Shannon said Tuesday it costs $200 million a month to keep the fleet flying.

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U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) introduced legislation Wednesday that would keep NASA flying the space shuttle program two years beyond its planned 2010 retirement.

Hutchisons bill, if enacted, would deal a setback to U.S. President Barack Obamas plan to retire NASAs space shuttle fleet after four more flights and rely on Russia, and eventually commercial U.

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Space shuttle Discovery is at its launch pad for an Easter Monday flight to the International Space Station.

Discovery is set to blast off April 5 with a load of science experiments. It will be the next-to-last flight for Discovery. Only four shuttle missions remain. Discovery is slated to make the final shuttle flight in September.

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Russia announced a halt to space tourism on Wednesday, saying it would struggle to ferry professional crews to the International Space Station after the U.S. mothballs its shuttle fleet this year.

Russia, sending crews to the ISS aboard its single-use three-man Soyuz ships, will double the number of manned launches to four this year because permanent crews of professional astronauts aboard the expanded station are set to rise to six.

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NASA hauled the space shuttle Discovery out to its seaside launch pad in Florida early Wednesday to prepare for a planned April 5 blastoff.

NASA began hauling the shuttle Discovery to the seaside Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida just before midnight. The trip took more than six hours.

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The thunderous roar from a space shuttle solid rocket booster reverberating and rebounding off the mountains of northern Utah was heard for the final time Thursday, as NASA and contractor Alliant Techsystems ignited their final ground test after three decades of static firings.

“That was probably the safest solid rocket motor ever test fired here,” commented Steve Cash, NASAs manager for the shuttle propulsion office.

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With the U.S. space shuttle program fading, a Utah company that makes powerful booster rockets for space travel conducted its final ground test Thursday.

About 5,000 people came to northern Utah’s Promontory near the Great Salt Lake to watch it fire, a company spokeswoman said.

The firing - with the 126-foot rocket anchored horizontally to the ground - ignited more than a million pounds of propellant in a split second and took about two minutes to burn off, according to NASA and Alliant Techsystems Inc.

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NASA chief Charles Bolden told senators Wednesday that sending astronauts to Mars is still the ultimate goal for U.S. human spaceflight, as he defended the agencys new space plan against criticism in a heated budget hearing.

But NASA will likely not have the technology to send astronauts to Mars for at least the next 10 years, he said.

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With the successful landing of the space shuttle Endeavour Sunday night, the International Space Station is on the verge of completion after $100 billion and 11 years of construction. NASA plans just four more missions to wrap up its few remaining station deliveries.

“Well go into that with our heads held high,” shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach said after the landing.

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