Nasa Officials

CHICAGO - In their first opportunity to face NASA administrators since the agency's budget ruled out repairs to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope, members of Congress questioned yesterday why a repair mission had seemingly evaporated after growing enthusiasm for the idea. Of the $93 million for the Hubble in the budget proposed last week, $75 million was earmarked for a suicide craft that will guide the telescope into a final descent into the ocean once its usefulness has run out, while $18 million was to be used for software upgrades that would allow Hubble to continue doing science after its worn-out parts inevitably begin to fail.

Weather postponed Tuesday's launch of the ORS-1 satellite attached to the Minotaur 1 rocket, according to NASA officials, leaving spectators in the Mid-Atlantic to wait for another day. The ORS-1 launch was scheduled between 8:28 p.m. and 11:28 p.m., from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Virginia's Wallops Island which will be visible between South Carolina up to New York and as far west as West Virginia. Officials said that if the launch was scrubbed, subsequent attempts will follow nightly through July 10, except for a three-day window around the planned launch of the space shuttle Atlantis from Cape Canaveral, Fla., set for July 8. The Air Force will launch the battlefield imaging satellite into orbit the first operational version of the Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space satellite series.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA officials said yesterday that a series of mysterious gas leaks had grounded the space shuttle Columbia, probably until December or later.The 10-day, $150 million Astro-1 observatory mission was postponed indefinitely while the space agency launches one and possibly two more shuttles with higher priority missions, said Lisa Malone, a spokeswoman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.While NASA technicians continued their search yesterday for the source of a liquid hydrogen leak the shuttle's dejected seven-member crew flew home to Houston.

WASHINGTON - -President Barack Obama wants to end the nation's troubled program to return astronauts to the moon, but NASA officials indicated Monday that any change was unlikely to mean cutbacks at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Obama's $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, which forecasts a record deficit, includes provisions for increased spending designed to improve the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a 1.4 percent annual pay increase for federal workers and an array of tax and education initiatives that would affect Maryland and the rest of the country, if Congress approves them.

The sensitive and costly instruments needed to repair the flawed Hubble Space Telescope will be reinspected to ensure against any contamination, following a wind storm that blew dust into a cargo room at Cape Canaveral, NASA officials said yesterday.The instruments, including the $50 million Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), were boxed and enclosed in two sealed plastic bags in a special, pressurized room on the launch pad, waiting to be loaded on the shuttle Endeavour, said Bruce Buckingham, a Cape spokesman.

Riddled with holes drilled by woodpeckers, the space shuttle Discovery will have to retreat to the hangar for repairs to its fuel-tank insulation, forcing an indefinite postponement of the launching that had been scheduled for this week, NASA officials at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., say.The birds were identified as yellow-shafted flickers, a common woodpecker in eastern North America. Technicians counted at least six dozen holes. Some birds penetrated to the tank's metal wall, but caused no damage to it.At a news briefing Friday, Al Sofge, assistant launching director at the Kennedy center, tried to be philosophical about having one of the $2 billion spaceships, built to withstand the rigors of orbital flight, driven off its launching pad by a flock of birds with mating on their minds.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A storm in California kept the space shuttle Atlantis from landing yesterday and could force the orbiter and its five-member crew to remain aloft today and possibly until after Thanksgiving, NASA officials said yesterday.Shuttle managers tried twice yesterday to schedule a landing for Atlantis at Edwards Air Force Base in California but had to cancel both attempts when winds gusted to 29 mph, exceeding NASA safety limits."This front is going to be hanging around," said Don Haley, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Edwards.

Bowie State University officials plan to announce today that the school will receive $7.8 million during the next five years under a federal program to bolster the training of black scientists and engineers.The award, paid for by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the largest single grant in the university's history."It's an institutional reform program," said Nagi T. Wakim, chairman of the school's computer science department. "It gives us a chance to do what we do, but do it better, and do more interesting things."

HOUSTON -- NASA has quietly acknowledged that the international space station will cost $3.6 billion more than the $17.4 billion cost cap established by Congress in 1993.The huge cost overrun was included without notice in budget documents presented to Congress recently by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and NASA officials confirmed it in interviews last week.Although experts had long feared that the program was headed for a financial crisis, the scale of the cost overruns and the range of serious problems caught experts by surprise.

WASHINGTON - NASA officials said yesterday that they have identified a 2-foot-long piece of wreckage from the space shuttle Columbia as a piece of the left wing - where evidence suggests the doomed craft's troubles began. The officials also said they recovered computer equipment Sunday that they hope might contain data about the shuttle's last seconds. There were conflicting accounts last night from NASA officials on the details of what the space agency had recovered. Investigators have been eager to piece together as much of the wing as possible, in hopes of determining whether a breach of its heat-protective tiles or front edge played a major role in the accident that killed seven astronauts.

President Barack Obama wants to end the nation's troubled program to return astronauts to the moon, but NASA officials indicated Monday that any change was unlikely to mean cutbacks at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Obama's $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, which forecasts a record deficit, includes provisions for increased spending designed to improve the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a 1.4 percent annual pay increase for federal workers and an array of tax and education initiatives that would affect Maryland and the rest of the country, if Congress approves them.

Confronted with the same kind of problem that doomed the space shuttle Columbia, NASA officials, chastened by years of criticism and upheaval in the agency, took a markedly different approach during the current mission of Endeavour, calling on an array of new tools and procedures in order to analyze and respond to the problem. While Columbia faced much more serious damage - a 6- to 10-inch-wide hole punched in a leading edge of one of its wings that let in searing gases during re-entry - outside officials said that NASA had taken steps far more elaborate and methodical with Endeavour than those performed during the Columbia flight.

NASA officials vowed yesterday to investigate reports that astronauts were drunk before missions on at least two occasions, but several former astronauts questioned the claims, saying that they were too closely monitored to risk breaking the rules on drinking before a flight. "I didn't see any use of alcohol that infringed safety," said Tom Jones, who served on four shuttle missions before retiring in 2001. "I didn't see any flight surgeons who would have hesitated to blow the whistle."

The future of the Hubble Space Telescope hangs in the balance today in Washington as top NASA managers weigh the feasibility and risks of sending shuttle astronauts on a fifth and final servicing mission to the observatory. Michael Griffin, the agency administrator, is scheduled to announce Tuesday at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt whether he'll order the mission. "There is talk about very little else at the moment. Everybody wants to know what's happening," said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages Hubble science.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Everything appeared normal June 5, 2002, as the shuttle Endeavour thundered into orbit from Kennedy Space Center through hazy afternoon skies. Unknown to the public, however, the Air Force's top two safety officials at Cape Canaveral had tried to stop the countdown. Air Force technicians could not verify that a critical backup system used to destroy errant rockets was working properly. In an apparently unprecedented move, the safety officers were overruled after a phone conversation between Brig.

NASA public affairs official George Deutsch, who had been accused of exerting political pressure on agency scientists, resigned his position late Tuesday, according to the space agency. National Aeronautics and Space Administration press secretary Dean Acosta declined to say yesterday why Deutsch left his job. But he said Deutsch claimed to be a journalism graduate from Texas A&M University, something the university denied. University spokesman Lane Stephenson said: "Our registrar's office tells us he attended Texas A&M, but he did not receive a degree."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With electrical supplies dwindling on the space shuttle Discovery, NASA officials say they are determined to bring it down safely early today despite unpredictable weather at the primary landing site in Florida. If weather prevents the shuttle from touching down at Kennedy Space Center for a second day, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering landing in New Mexico or at the shuttle's primary backup site in California. "We're going to land [today]

Confronted with the same kind of problem that doomed the space shuttle Columbia, NASA officials, chastened by years of criticism and upheaval in the agency, took a markedly different approach during the current mission of Endeavour, calling on an array of new tools and procedures in order to analyze and respond to the problem. While Columbia faced much more serious damage - a 6- to 10-inch-wide hole punched in a leading edge of one of its wings that let in searing gases during re-entry - outside officials said that NASA had taken steps far more elaborate and methodical with Endeavour than those performed during the Columbia flight.

Switching their focus from the farthest galaxies to Earth's nearest neighbor, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of a mineral on the moon that might someday provide human explorers with life-sustaining oxygen and rocket fuel. Researchers said yesterday that they had detected ilmenite - a compound of iron, titanium and oxygen - at two Apollo landing sites and another region never visited. NASA officials said the work lays the scientific foundation for robotic prospecting missions - an orbiter due for launch in 2008 and one or more landers later.

Hurricane Katrina extensively damaged NASA space shuttle facilities, raising the strong possibility of flight delays that could jeopardize the future of the Hubble Space Telescope. Katrina caused an estimated $500 million in damage to the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, NASA officials said yesterday, and $600 million at the Mississippi-based Stennis Space Center, 45 miles east of there. The shuttles' fuel tanks are built at Michoud and shuttle engines are tested at Stennis. NASA has not set a date for a Hubble servicing mission, and the agency's first priority in using the shuttle is servicing the International Space Station.