NASA is Making Preliminary Plans to Extend Shuttle Launches Beyond 2010
This news may come as a surprise to many, especially since Michael Griffin's remarks that to extend the life of the Shuttle fleet could put astronauts in danger and cripple the agency's fledgling Constellation program. However, there has been mounting political pressure on NASA to find an alternative to depending on the Russian space agency's Soyuz spacecraft to access the International Space Station in the five years before the brand new Constellation Program is scheduled to launch by 2015.
2 comments:
This really has nothing to do with NASA being dysfunctional, and everything to do with having a viable alternative to resupply and sustain the ISS within the noted gap period prior to the Constellation being available, and not being wholly dependent on the Russian Soyuz, as the article notes.
You may have heard about this little conflict started by Russia recently in Georgia, and what it implies if Putin wants to play more hard ball by using Soyuz as a bargaining chip regarding ISS?
Maybe I was being too hard on NASA. It's the romantic in me: the part that gets angry whenever I watch "2001."
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