Space Agency

WASHINGTON - The breakup of the space shuttle Columbia yesterday has revived a long-simmering debate in Congress about the future of the nation's space program. The disaster, which is certain to lead to new hearings, also renewed questions about whether cost-cutting and management problems at NASA might be compromising astronauts' safety. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican and member of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the space agency, was walking in her Dallas neighborhood when she heard the shuttle break up, a noise she initially mistook for a sonic boom.

Morgan State University's School of Engineering has received a $6 million, five-year grant from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to establish a research center that will provide space missions with a technology base for the production of microwave components and systems, the university announced this week. Called the Center for Advanced Microwave Research and Applications, the program is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's effort to encourage competitive aerospace research and technological capability among historically black colleges and universities, Morgan officials said.

As of yesterday, pop star Lance Bass was a man without a mission. Fed up Russian space officials said Bass and the consortium backing his flight to the International Space Station hadn't paid up, so he can no longer train in Star City, Russia, for the Oct. 27 mission. Hollywood handlers for Bass, a singer with the boy band 'N Sync, said they still were negotiating and hadn't given up making him the world's youngest person in space. Television producer David Krieff of Destiny Productions had landed commitments from sponsors such as Radio Shack and had planned a television show about the trip.

Unless Congress acts this year to restore funding cut by the Bush administration, scientists say, they might lose their last opportunity for the next 200 years to study Pluto - the only planet in the solar system not yet visited by a spacecraft from Earth. At risk is the $488 million New Horizons mission, now in the design stage at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel and planned for launch in January 2006. The Bush administration canceled funding for exploration of the outer planets in NASA's proposed 2003 budget, saying the projects had grown too costly.

As flexible as the human arm is, you'll never give yourself a back rub, and you sure can't reach to the back seat of a minivan to separate the kids. NASA engineers faced a similar problem on the International Space Station: They needed a powerful space crane to help assemble and service the station. But the space shuttle's 50-foot robot arm is too small and inflexible to reach every part of the 290-foot outpost and too weak to handle huge new station components. A permanently anchored crane that could do all that would be too big and too heavy to reach orbit.

KOROLYOV, Russia -- The Mir space station streaked back to Earth early today as a molten blaze of metal and fire, harmlessly raking a swath of the South Pacific like a load of cosmic buckshot. The controlled descent, which ended Mir's 15-year career as an orbiting laboratory for Soviet and then Russian science, was managed with remarkable precision by the Russian space agency. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled splashdown, Russian officials announced that a U.S. ground station on Guam had confirmed that Mir was descending through the atmosphere according to plan, following a final burn of its retro-rocket system.

The prevailing joke at an international conference on low-cost space missions went like this: "Faster, Better, Cheaper? You can only pick two." During their three-day meeting last week at the Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, engineers and industry officials from around the country acknowledged an aching truth behind the three little words that have bedeviled space projects through much of the last decade. Given today's aerospace technology and production skills, fast and cheap are easy.

baltimorecity.gov LET'S HEAR IT for Frank Perrelli. With just $150 for an extra piece of software, the planning department graphic designer has created a breakthrough Web site for Baltimore city government. Unlike the City Council's much-ballyhooed $150,000 Web site (which is still a bust), the Perrelli version -- baltimorecity.gov -- actually gives citizens useful information. It contains Mayor Martin O'Malley's transition task force reports and recommendations. The new crime-fighting strategy, too, will be on the Web. A Web site, though, is only as good as its links.

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.

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."