Florida Lawmakers Pushing for Space Shuttle Extension, New Rocket
Florida lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation to extend the shuttle beyond its scheduled retirement this year and speed government development of a heavy-lift rocket.
The bill is designed to counter President Barack Obama's budget for NASA, which proposes abandoning the Constellation program to return people to the moon and would continue plans to retire the shuttle.
Obama wants to rely on Russian and commercial rockets to ferry supplies and people to the International Space Station, which he has proposed extending from 2015 to 2020.
http://www.space.com/news/florida-lawmakers-push-extend-shuttle-100311.html
PY4MAB – Thu, 2010 – 03 – 11 20:09
More Space Station Participation Urged
Heads of the five space agencies in the International Space Station (ISS) partnership have decided to try to expand participation by other nations in the orbiting laboratory, while not opening up the formal partnership to new members.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said March 16 that at the heads of agency meeting held in Tokyo last week to discuss the implications of the U.S. decision to continue funding station operations beyond 2015 to 2020 or beyond, the partners agreed to broaden their organizations' separate efforts to bring in new participants.
"Opening up the partnership is very difficult because now you're talking about treaties and agreements," Bolden told reporters after an appearance at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon. "What we talked about was trying to expand participants in the International Space Station. We've all been trying to do that."
The five ISS partners â€" Canada, Japan, Russia, the U.S. and the European Space Agency â€" embraced the Obama administration's decision to continue funding the station, a move they had been urging since George W. Bush was U.S. president. Although the Obama decision only covers the five-year runout of the Fiscal 2011 budget request for NASA, the partnership is working to certify the station structure and other on-orbit hardware for service through 2028 (Aerospace DAILY, March 12).
Chinese space officials have informally expressed interest in sending their astronauts to the ISS, and India is in the early stages of mounting its own human spaceflight effort. Once the space shuttle fleet is retired at the end of this year, Russia and China will be the only nations able to orbit humans.
Bolden cited a recent ESA "presentation of opportunities" for Earth science, biomedical research and other research on the station as an example of the sort of work the heads of the partner agencies would like to see expanded beyond member states, bringing in other nationalities, but not as full partners like ESA. "That's what we talked about, and everybody is in favor of it," he said.