Nasa Officials

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.

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.

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."

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.

HOUSTON - The NASA official who ran shuttle management meetings during the fatal Columbia mission said yesterday that she did not hear the continuing worries of engineers about debris that had struck the shuttle. In her first public statement, Linda Ham, chairwoman of the mission management team, defended NASA and its staff with passion, and at times with tears. But her account also depicted a space agency in which internal communications broke down, whether because of a failure of process or of courage.

Taylor Davis will remember his ninth birthday as the day he briefly donned a spacesuit. He had to lift the face mask before he could hear his fourth-grade classmates at Carrolltowne Elementary calling."

HOUSTON - On the day shuttle astronauts exchanged hugs and received a traditional Russian welcome of bread and salt after docking with the International Space Station, NASA said yesterday that more pieces of foam came off Discovery during the launch and that one may have hit a wing. They said they were confident, however, that the suspect piece of foam was so small that it could have caused no damage that would prevent Discovery from returning safely to Earth. The foam piece was one of three revealed in new images released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

CAPE CANAVERAL - NASA managers decided yesterday to officially target a three-week period starting in mid-May for the space shuttle's return to flight. A combination of delays caused by summer hurricanes and continuing technical challenges led program officials to conclude four weeks ago that an earlier launch opportunity in March and April was not feasible. Yesterday's decision means the shuttle's first flight since the February 2003 Columbia accident is tentatively planned between May 12 and June 3. Some in the program privately contend that those dates likely will slip again to July or possibly September because of the amount of work that lies ahead.

The director of NASA's $159 million Contour mission says there is no more than a "one in 10,000" chance that his team will recover the spacecraft, which went silent Aug. 15, six weeks into a four-year journey to study comets. Controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel lost contact with the spacecraft soon after it fired its solid-fuel motor last week to rocket out of Earth orbit toward an encounter with Comet Encke planned for next year. Misson Director Robert W. Farquhar said the spacecraft's motor apparently worked perfectly for 48 seconds of the planned 50-second burn.

The Republican-controlled Congress is moving to throttle down the Clinton administration's proposed NASA budget for fiscal year 2000, and the threatened cuts have space scientists gasping for breath. The House Appropriations Committee voted yesterday to cut more than $924 million from NASA's proposed $13.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2000, which begins Oct. 1. Last night, the full House passed the bill, with the funding cuts intact, on a 235-187 vote. If the money is not restored in negotiations with the Senate, space agency officials said, canceled space missions at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt alone would mean the loss of 2,500 government and contractors' jobs, half of them in Maryland and Virginia.