Space Agency

With a flourish of new images - from exploding stars to colliding galaxies and a new impact scar on Jupiter - NASA officials finally pulled the wraps off the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday, almost four months after astronauts completed a final round of repairs and upgrades. "Hubble is back in action," said Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.. "You're only getting the tiniest taste of what astronomers are planning to do with Hubble over the many years it's going to last."

NASA stuck with the tried-and-true yesterday in awarding a landmark space privatization contract to a team led by Lockheed Martin Corp. and featuring AlliedSignal Technical Services Corp. Columbia.The Consolidated Space Operations Contract, known as CSOC, is valued at more than $3 billion over the next 10 years and is intended as a turning point in the way the space agency does business.The winning team of companies, which features more than three dozen subcontractors, will take over management of most of NASA's unmanned spacecraft.

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.

DURING the Apollo missions, it seemed almost unpatriotic to ask how much it was costing to put a man on the moon and bring him home safely. But the need for deficit reduction erased that shyness. NASA has seen its budget cut almost every year since 1992. The space agency has had to scale back projects, reduce its work force and be more precise about spending. Cost overruns still occur, but a leaner NASA appeared to be keeping them within reason.That was an illusion. Confidence in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was shaken to the core last week by news that space station Alpha is already $3.6 billion over budget.

WASHINGTON -- NASA is expected to announce today that Sen. John Glenn, who became a hero 36 years ago as the first American to orbit Earth, will return to space in October as part of the shuttle Discovery mission.Glenn, who will turn 77 in July, would become the oldest person ever to go into space.He has been asking the space agency for several years for the opportunity, arguing that he could be an in-flight subject for tests that might shed light on the aging process.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration declined to confirm yesterday that Glenn would be returning to space, but it scheduled a news conference for today that Glenn planned to attend.

Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute will serve as the earthbound observatory for the Next Generation Space Telescope, NASA's chief said yesterday, preserving hundreds of high-paying jobs and insuring that the city will remain one of the planet's most important windows on the universe.The NGST, expected to replace the Hubble Space Telescope early in the new century, will extend the limits of the visible universe from about 7 billion light-years to 12 billion light-years, into a region astronomers call the "Dark Zone."

BABY BOOMERS get to resurrect one of their heroes. John Glenn, who 36 years ago became the first American to orbit Earth, has been approved to take a space shuttle flight later this year. He will be 77 years old. The space agency, trying to justify what some view as a wildly expensive stunt, says the mission will provide valuable data about space flight's effect on the elderly. But Story Musgrave, 61, was on a 1996 shuttle flight, and Mr. Glenn is said to be in better shape than many younger men.A shuttle ride for Mr. Glenn, however, has greater value than providing a nostalgia trip for the generation that now gets to decide such things.

APRIL HAS been a tough month for Russian space scientists. They celebrated the 36th anniversary of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) while acknowledging they work in a shadow of the program that accomplished that feat. Once proud of the envy their dominance in space exploration caused, Russians now cross their fingers the U.S. Congress won't cut their life line.It appears that won't happen. The House Science Committee has voted to continue funding of the space station, a joint venture whose construction has been delayed nearly a year because of the Russians.

THE INDEPENDENCE DAY landing on Mars of the U.S. spacecraft Pathfinder signifies not only how far the American space program has come, but the depths to which the once-superior Russian program has fallen. This accomplishment was supposed to be shared with the people who awed Americans 40 years ago by launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The Russians' Mars 96 probe was supposed to land on Mars, too, two months from now. But it crashed only hours after takeoff last November.There has been a litany of problems in the Russian space program since then, including costly delays in constructing its portion of the international space station -- a module that is supposed to be launched next year.

PARIS -- All manner of creatures, from monkeys to salamanders, have followed Laika the dog into orbit since 1957, while hundreds of men have succeeded Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut -- but only a handful of women have made it into space in the Russian program.It may seem strange that whatever giant leaps women have made in earthbound commerce and industry in the 33 years since Valentina Tereshkova became the first female cosmonaut, the Russian space program has remained largely the domain of men.Only a few years ago a Russian commander, whose crew included Britain's first astronaut -- a woman -- was quoted as saying: "It's not a woman's business to fly into space."

With a flourish of new images - from exploding stars to colliding galaxies and a new impact scar on Jupiter - NASA officials finally pulled the wraps off the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday, almost four months after astronauts completed a final round of repairs and upgrades. "Hubble is back in action," said Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.. "You're only getting the tiniest taste of what astronomers are planning to do with Hubble over the many years it's going to last."

President Barack Obama's selection on Saturday of former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. to head NASA gives a boost to the agency's manned space program and its stated goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020. During the presidential campaign, Obama had seemed lukewarm toward NASA and its hugely expensive human spaceflight program. Space enthusiasts were particularly worried after Obama staffers floated the idea of taking money from the space agency to fund domestic programs. But now, with the selection of a retired Marine general and astronaut to run the agency, observers are asking whether this means the president has suddenly got religion for manned space flight.

WASHINGTON -- Better practice your royal wave. The queen is coming to Maryland. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has added a stop at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt to the schedule for her state visit to America next month. The 81-year-old monarch and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 85, will spend about two hours at Goddard on May 8, the British embassy and the space center said yesterday. They will visit mission control and speak with astronauts on the International Space Station.

Houston -- Astronaut Lisa Nowak, charged with attempted kidnapping after confronting a rival for another astronaut's affections at an Orlando airport last month, was fired by NASA yesterday. She is the first astronaut ever dismissed by the space agency. NASA's decision does not reflect the agency's belief in her guilt or innocence, said spokesman James Hartsfield. "The primary reason for the termination is we don't have the administrative means to deal with the criminal charges against her," he said.

WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin said yesterday that an agency-wide effort is under way to make sure political appointees are not stifling scientific openness. Testifying at a hearing of the House Science Committee, Griffin heard lawmakers from both parties ask the space agency to guarantee "free and open inquiry." The debate began three weeks ago after NASA climatologist James Hansen accused a political appointee in the office of public affairs with muzzling his views on global warming because they conflicted with those of the Bush administration.

NEW YORK --The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

WASHINGTON -- NASA got what it wanted - and more - yesterday when the Senate approved a $16.5 billion annual spending plan for the space agency in an otherwise very tight budget year. The money will pay for the start-up of NASA's new moon-Mars venture, more space shuttle flights, a repair mission to the Hubble telescope and other programs. The spending plan for 2006, which passed 94-5, is a slight increase over the current budget. But the agency is looking at an expensive transition in the next few years as it tries to balance the cost of ending its shuttle program and International Space Station construction with the planned voyages to the moon and Mars.

MOSCOW - At a time when American manned missions have been suspended because of design flaws in the space shuttle, Russian authorities want to spin past the moon with a humble vehicle now serving as NASA's space taxi. Not only are Russian officials planning their nation's first lunar fly-by, according to Russian media reports, but they hope to make the mission at least partly self-financing by selling a seat aboard the venerable Soyuz spacecraft for $100 million. Where the shuttle is like a winged, spacious space SUV, Russia's Soyuz is an insect-like three-seater compact based on a 1960s design.

WASHINGTON - At NASA's request, scientists have given the space agency a detailed wish list of missions they hope to see conducted over the next 30 years. The proposals range from something as down to earth as a satellite to measure all our planet's rainfall to a far-out mission looking back to the dawn of time. That venture would send a spacecraft, the Big Bang Observer, to study the explosion that astronomers believe gave birth to the universe roughly 13.7 billion years ago. The goal of the latter mission is to "determine what powered the Big Bang and how the universe began and evolved," said Paul Hertz, a senior scientist in NASA's Office of Space Science.

WASHINGTON - A divided advisory group concluded yesterday that NASA had failed to fully meet three key recommendations for safely returning the space shuttle to flight, including eliminating all critical launch debris and developing a way to repair the ship's heat shielding in orbit. Although embarrassing to NASA, the findings by the Stafford-Covey Task Group are not expected to postpone the planned launch of Discovery in July. Members of the panel who spoke yesterday after their final public meeting in Washington lauded NASA's efforts to improve the shuttle and said yesterday's verdict does not mean that the ship is unsafe.