Space Agency

"Our national ambitions have greatly outrun our national competence," said Dr. James A. Van Allen, the physicist who discovered the radiation belts around the Earth.His remark might well have been incorporated in last week's report by a panel of experts that recommended that the nation's space program be substantially altered by de-emphasizing the space shuttle, developing a new class of unmanned rockets to carry payloads aloft and simplifying the planned -- and expensive -- space station.

The U.S. Senate gave the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a much-needed vote of confidence last week when it turned back an attempt to kill the multibillon-dollar space station.This vote represented a victory for NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, who has been struggling to reshape the agency's mission and goals as well as retool the way it does business in an era of budget austerity. The agency has shifted its emphasis from costly, complex missions, like the failed $1 billion Mars Observer spacecraft, to smaller projects that produce new knowledge at relatively modest cost.

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.

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.

A Pakistani man living in Maryland has been charged with scheming to smuggle materials and equipment used in nuclear processing to agencies in his home country, federal officials announced Wednesday. Nadeem Akhtar, 45, of Silver Spring is accused in a grand jury indictment of buying the materials from U.S. companies and shipping them to blacklisted Pakistani agencies by lying to shipping companies about what the packages contained between 2005 and 2010. Some of the goods Akhtar and an unnamed co-defendant arranged to ship to sites in Pakistan, prosecutors said, include radiation-detection equipment, resins used to purify coolant water in nuclear power plants, calibration devices and selector switches, which fall under Department of Commerce rules that closely regulate the export of "dual-use items," or materials that potentially have both commercial and nuclear purposes.

Washington. -- The battle to kill the space station will resume this week when the Congress returns from the July 4 break, thus offering the U. S. space program a chance at salvation from its severest threat -- the myopia of NASA and its friends in industry and on Capitol Hill.In June, the House of Representatives, after seriously deliberating a move to terminate the space station, voted to keep it going by cannibalizing scarce funds from the rest of NASA to provide $1.9 billion for next year.

CHANTILLY, Va. -- They don't know when they'll fly, where they'll go, or even how they'll get there. But that didn't stop a new group of 11 men and women from joining the elite ranks of NASA's astronaut corps. The 2004 class -- which includes one Marylander -- was introduced for the first time to a cheering crowd of schoolchildren at the National Air and Space Museum's cavernous Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport yesterday. Richard "Ricky" Arnold II, a 40-year-old science teacher who grew up in Bowie and teaches seventh grade at an international school in Romania, knows he is joining the space agency during one of the most murky moments in its 66-year history.

Calling the Hubble Space Telescope "the most important telescope in history," a blue-ribbon panel says NASA should consider all options for keeping the instrument operational - including a repair run by shuttle astronauts, if necessary. The recommendations, contained in a National Academy of Sciences report leaked to the media yesterday, come as NASA is struggling to decide whether to send a human or robotic mission to rescue the telescope. In the wake of the Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts in February 2003, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe canceled a final scheduled servicing trip by shuttle astronauts to install new instruments and replace failing batteries and gyroscopes.

NASA's new administrator said yesterday that he's willing to launch the shuttle Discovery even if the space agency hasn't met all the safety goals for a return to flight that were set by a panel that investigated the Columbia disaster. In his first news conference, just five days after his confirmation by the Senate, Michael D. Griffin said he will rely on the expertise of NASA's top engineers to determine whether Discovery is ready to fly. "I have enormous confidence in the shuttle team," he said.