Astronauts

American astronauts undergo a psychological assessment when they join NASA but face no further evaluations during their careers unless issues arise during their annual flight physicals, the space agency said yesterday. "No other psychological assessments are done for shuttle astronauts after that initial one unless a concern is raised," said NASA public affairs officer Katherine Trinidad. Navy Capt. Lisa M. Nowak's problems had slipped below NASA's radar and surfaced Monday in a bizarre meltdown and alleged assault on Air Force Capt.

With apologies to the esteemed Diane Rehm of National Public Radio, please join us for Susan's Tuesday news roundup, during which a roundtable of her multiple personalities, each representing a different mood, will dissect the headlines. Doping scandals in the Tour de France. Gambling among NBA refs. Dog-fighting in the highest reaches of NFL stardom. And suspected steroid abuse by a home-run record-challenger. And nothing but yawns from the fans over what one sportswriter described as the "shocking nadir" of professional sports.

CINDER LAKE, Ariz. -- It looks, for all the world, like someplace out of this world, which is pretty much why NASA scientists and engineers recently journeyed here to a remote volcanic cinder field in northern Arizona. In this barren, black moonscape of a place just outside Flagstaff, where NASA's Apollo astronauts trained for the first moon landings more than 40 years ago, history is repeating itself as the nation's space agency tests out concepts for the next generation of spacesuits, lunar rovers and robots that will be needed to send Americans back to the moon as soon as 2020.

The seven astronauts picked to fly the final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope next year got a rousing welcome yesterday as they made the traditional courtesy call on the folks in Baltimore whose jobs may hang on how well the crew does its work. The crew of Servicing Mission 4 arrived to applause and cheers from a crowd that crammed the auditorium at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They introduced themselves, showed some training films they brought along from Houston. They also brought along their comedy act. OK, so it was astronaut humor.

Astronauts successfully stitched together tears in a sheet of solar panels on the International Space Station early yesterday morning in a seven-hour operation that was one of the most difficult ever attempted in space. Spacewalker Scott E. Parazynski snipped a guide wire that had snagged on the long, wing-like solar array and another wire that had gotten tangled in the damaged area. He also laced five makeshift braces made of aluminum, wire and insulating tape - dubbed "cuff links" by the crew - into the panels to stabilize them.

Two weeks ago on Real Time With Bill Maher, it was shocking to hear Mos Def, maybe the best actor in pictures today, express his belief that Sept. 11 was an inside job and the moon landing was a set-up. In the Shadow of the Moon, a vibrant documentary on the Apollo missions, is so inspiring it could turn conspiracy theorists like Mos Def into true believers. It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting. The British director David Sington uses stunning archival footage and a string of interviews with astronauts to construct a personal history of the race to beat the Soviets to the moon that has the buildup, velocity, setbacks and catharses of a classic drama.

HOUSTON -- Astronauts added a room to the International Space Station yesterday morning, working outside the station and inside to move the Harmony module, which will serve as a connection point for two new laboratories in the station, to a temporary location on the side of the station. The space station's robot arm, operated by Stephanie Wilson and Daniel Tani, smoothly moved the 16-ton module out of the shuttle and onto the station, where automatic bolts secured it in a temporary home to the side of the station's living quarters.

THIRTY YEARS AGO this month, a man from Ohio took a walk on the moon. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, the eyes and ears of the folks back home on Earth followed his every bouncy step and static-laced word. On that night of triumph for imagination, bravery and technological skill, we could thrill to the idea that humankind was beginning a grand new adventure.By contrast, today's manned spaceflight program seems boringly routine. Few Americans notice the many launches that occur each year.

A summer before, the nation had paused in its grief and gathered around TVs to watch Robert F. Kennedy's funeral services and the passage of the special train that conveyed his remains from New York City to Washington for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.A little over a year later, on July 20, 1969, Marylanders and people across the nation once again clustered around televisions and radios in living rooms and bars and other public places to follow the hair-raising progress of astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. and Lt. Col. Michael Collins as they sped through space on Apollo 11 and prepared to land on the surface of the moon.

The airplane hanging over my head makes me uneasy, but the regulars at The Roost restaurant in St. Mary's County don't seem to notice it. People in this part of Southern Maryland are used to sharing the landscape with planes.I notice the roar of Navy jets streaking through the skies as soon as I drive toward Lexington Park on my gustatory tour of the state. It is not surprising that a model of a V-22 Osprey plane looms over my head in The Roost's bar.Ever since The Roost opened 52 years ago, it has been a favorite eating spot and watering hole for Navy pilots.

I was watching the bright half-moon last week, slowly fading in the light of the morning sun. The space program has grown opaque in the same way after two Apollo 11 astronauts first walked on the moon 40 years ago today. It even came to seem half a program. The shuttle stagecoaches in Earth orbit have attracted less and less national interest except when the Challenger exploded in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003. I was at Cape Kennedy four days before the Apollo 11 liftoff. In a predawn hour, Neil Armstrong, Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins walked past us going to work, carrying their air conditioners.

The following article appeared in editions of The Sun on Monday, July 21, 1969. Albert Sehlstedt Jr., who worked for The Sun for 40 years, died in 2008 at age 86. Houston, July 20- - Men from earth stepped onto the surface of the moon tonight. Two American astronauts realized a dream of centuries by treading on the powdery lunar surface nearly seven hours after making a "very smooth" landing in the moon's Sea of Tranquillity. Neil A. Armstrong, 38, of Wapakonela, Ohio, made the first historic step at 10:56 p.m., descending a ladder of nine rungs on one of the four legs of the lunar landing craft.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped down from their Apollo 11 moon lander 40 years ago tomorrow, they seemed to move in their bulky spacesuits with an unlikely ease. Only a handful of the millions watching them on TV that night knew that many of the spacewalking skills and tools developed during the missions leading up to the historic landing had their origins in a 75-foot swimming pool at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills. Three years earlier, at a time when U.S. astronauts were failing miserably in their first attempts to move and work effectively outside their spacecraft, it was a pair of Randallstown researchers -- Sam Mattingly and Harry Loats -- who persuaded NASA that underwater training was the best way to simulate the challenges of getting the job done in outer space.

The crowd of scientists watching on the big screen in the auditorium of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore went silent Thursday when it appeared a single stuck bolt might foil NASA's plans to install a powerful new camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronaut Drew Feustel had tried and failed to budge it with his power wrench. If he couldn't muscle it into submission with elbow grease alone, the 15-year-old camera would have to be reconnected. Worse, its replacement - the $150 million Wide Field Camera 3, packing more than ten times the "discovery power" of the old camera - would have to be repacked for the ride home.

Seven astronauts are stranded in orbit after their shuttle is damaged during launch. Unable to repair the ship, they hunker down with dwindling supplies while four more astronauts board a second spacecraft and blast off on a daring rescue mission. NASA executives would like to keep this scenario in the realm of science fiction. But they're preparing for it just the same on the slim chance the shuttle Atlantis is crippled during the May 11 repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. A second shuttle - Endeavour - is poised for liftoff from Cape Canaveral if there's a call for help from Atlantis.

Poor pressure suit design led the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle to black out almost immediately when the craft broke apart during re-entry in 2003 and they probably were killed as their bodies were buffeted by the craft's violent contortions, a NASA panel said yesterday. At least three other design flaws associated with seat belts, helmets and parachutes also could have caused their deaths if they had survived those problems, the panel said in its final report on the incident.

The Russian invasion of Georgia complicated what was already a major headache for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: how to get to and from the International Space Station, which was funded mostly by U.S. taxpayer dollars, after NASA's aging fleet of space shuttles retires in 2010. NASA expected Russian rockets to ferry its astronauts between 2010 and 2015, when the shuttle's replacement is due to fly. But a chill in U.S.-Russian relations could throw a monkey wrench into that plan.

GREENBELT - In about two weeks, some 24,000 pounds of what may be the most thoroughly-tested and closely-inspected hardware on earth will be packed into custom crates, mounted on flatbed trucks and shipped as "wide load" cargo to Cape Canaveral, Fla. When it arrives, the one-of-a kind camera and spectrograph, now being stored at the Goddard Space Flight Center, will be inspected once more, loaded on to the space shuttle Atlantis and launched into orbit...

Astronauts successfully stitched together tears in a sheet of solar panels on the International Space Station early yesterday morning in a seven-hour operation that was one of the most difficult ever attempted in space. Spacewalker Scott E. Parazynski snipped a guide wire that had snagged on the long, wing-like solar array and another wire that had gotten tangled in the damaged area. He also laced five makeshift braces made of aluminum, wire and insulating tape - dubbed "cuff links" by the crew - into the panels to stabilize them.

NASA managers have extended the mission of space shuttle Discovery by a day so that the orbiting astronauts can take a closer look at a problem discovered during the weekend with the solar arrays powering the International Space Station. The decision yesterday to perform what the space agency is calling "exploratory surgery" was made after spacewalking astronauts from Discovery spotted what appeared to be metal shavings inside a rotational joint that allows the solar panels to track the motion of the sun. "When I opened the panel I saw black dust, like metallic shavings," said astronaut Daniel Tani, during an interview from space.