Space Center

The Baikonur space center in Soviet Kazakhstan will become a joint-stock company called International Spaceport, offering its services on a commercial basis, Tass news agency says.The new company will compete with the European Ariane consortium and U.S. and Chinese aerospace firms in launching all kinds of spacecraft using Soviet rockets, a spokesman for the Kazakhstan space research agency said yesterday.Eighty percent of the stock shares will be held by the agency, major commercial banks and the space associations of Russia and the Ukraine.

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will get a $128 million slice of a new mission to grab a sample from an asteroid and return it to Earth in 2023. NASA selected the $800 million OSIRIS-Rex mission for funding Wednesday, passing over competing proposals to send spacecraft to Venus and the moon. The work will be led by Michael J. Drake at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and managed by Goddard. Engineers at the space center will also build one of its instruments.

Tours of the Hubble Space Telescope control center, model rocket launches, talks by NASA experts and explanations of solar flares will be on tap today when the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt opens to the public for the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Visitors will see Hubble's dimly lit control center, where scientists control the cameras used to capture the images of galaxies that enliven classroom walls around the country. The tour stops will include views of the 90-foot-high "clean room," with its dust-free environment for testing Hubble equipment; a life-size model of the Columbia space shuttle; the cumbersome space gloves worn by astronauts during Hubble servicing missions and a centrifuge where the durability of satellites is tested.

GREENBELT - Astrophysicists like to dance. Who knew? Another thing you might have learned yesterday at the Goddard Space Flight Center was that if you zip yourself into a striped suit of a certain adhesive material you will stick to a wall made of Velcro. And if you do it once, you'll have to do it twice. "I just want to go on the Velcro again," said Maria Cummings, one of seven children in a Gaithersburg family, who was so excited by the prospect of reconnecting with the wall that she became momentarily confused as to whether she was 8 or 9. Her 6-year-old brother John - no question about his age - was more concerned with the cookies being doled out by members of the Goddard Dance Club, run by scientists and other brainy types who apparently like to shake a leg when they're not busy figuring out the trajectory of some billion-dollar spaceship hurtling toward the stars.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon. ... In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon ... it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there." -- John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961 The 45-rpm record had long gathered dust on a bookshelf of my mother's home. This rendition of "Man on the Moon" was recorded not by the rock group R.E.M. but by CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, and it stirs memories of a euphoric time in the United States, man's first landing on the moon in 1969.

At the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, Fla., the newest attraction is so clever it's a wonder someone didn't come up with the idea years ago.It's a journey along the assembly line where engineers and technicians are building the International Space Station -- the orbiting platform for the next generation of space exploration.And we, like medical students perched in the observation gallery of an operating room in some great teaching hospital, can peer down and watch the magic.Nick Thomas is our guide.

WASHINGTON - NASA appointed a veteran of three space flight centers yesterday to take over the shuttle program as it moves into the critical phase of returning the three remaining shuttles to space. William Parsons, who has been director of the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi since August, will replace Ron Dittemore, who announced last month that he would step down. Dittemore will leave after the independent board investigating the loss Feb. 1 of the shuttle Columbia issues its report this summer.

An inspection of sophisticated instruments needed to repair the Hubble Space Telescope found no trace of contamination from a fine layer of dust that had seeped into a cargo room where the equipment was stored at the Kennedy Space Center, a spokeswoman said yesterday.The instruments are being repackaged at Kennedy, where they will be loaded onto the Shuttle Endeavour for the planned Dec. * *TC mission to service and repair NASA's $1.5 billion space telescope, said Lisa Malone, a spokeswoman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the Florida space center.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A firm hired to improve NASA's flawed safety culture in the wake of the shuttle Columbia accident issued an interim report yesterday showing progress at three of the agency's field centers. A survey conducted in September by Behavioral Science Technology Inc., a California company training NASA employees to communicate and make decisions better, found positive change across the board when compared with a survey a year ago. The report focused primarily on the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The two main contractors on the space shuttle program, Rockwell International Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., announced a joint venture yesterday that will compete to take over the program's daily operations from NASA.The companies predicted that, if their venture won the award, job cuts at their various shuttle divisions would be likely. The bulk of the companies' 20,000 shuttle workers are at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida."I would expect that [job reduction]

Jack Evans, a retired mechanical engineer and former Rockdale resident, died Friday of Parkinson's disease at a health care center in Rock Hill, S.C. He was 87. Mr. Evans was born and raised in Crumpler, W.Va. He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University in 1946. After earning his master's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 1949, he went to work for Monroe Auto Equipment in Michigan. He came to Baltimore in the early 1950s when he took a job at Rheem Manufacturing Co. in Sparrows Point where water heaters were manufactured.

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.

Joseph E. Vitale, an electrical engineer who worked with cancer support groups, died of brain cancer Friday at his Gambrills home. He was 41. Mr. Vitale was born in Newark, N.J., and raised in Old Bridge, N.Y., and Brick, N.J. After graduating from high school in 1983, he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., in 1987. He worked for Bendix Corp. in Towson from 1987 until 1991, when he took a similar position at MSI Inc. in Washington.

CAPE CANAVERAL,Fla. -- Weather permitting, Discovery will end its 13 days in orbit this morning with the first shuttle landing at the Kennedy Space Center since 2002. Discovery's six astronauts are scheduled to touch down at 9:14 a.m. to complete a supply flight to the International Space Station that included a critical repair to the outpost and delivery of a crew member. Weather is expected to be acceptable, with the biggest concern a chance of showers near Cape Canaveral. "My experience is that at the Kennedy Space Center, it [weather]

As the seven Discovery astronauts were welcomed back to Houston yesterday, a preliminary assessment of the shuttle's condition showed that it survived the two-week mission with remarkably little damage. "It's as clean a vehicle as I have ever seen after a landing," said Dean Schaaf, commander of the team that secures the shuttle while it is still on the runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Discovery landed at Edwards in the Mojave Desert early Tuesday morning because of bad weather near Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

HOUSTON - As the slightly damaged orbiter Discovery and its crew began preparations to undock from the International Space Station yesterday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin defended Discovery's mission, calling it one of the cleanest on record. "It's been a magnificent flight," Griffin said at an appearance with Texas legislators at the Johnson Space Center. "I don't know what people could want that they haven't seen." He said critics have fixated on the flaws of the flight, such as insulating foam being shed from the craft's external fuel tank during liftoff and the need for a first-ever space walk to remove protrusions on the underside of Discovery.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- If watching last week's record-setting space walks on television left you gasping for air, don't hold your breath waiting for more such fireworks from NASA's shuttle program.With the return yesterday of the space shuttle Endeavour from its successful repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA doesn't need to send an astronaut through a shuttle's air lock again until . . . the next Hubble maintenance flight, tentatively set for late 1996.Between now and then, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is planning two-dozen shuttle flights, but most involve scientific missions, using instruments to monitor Earth's environment or conducting experiments in the shuttles' removable Spacelab module.

Most of the young scientists who came out to the Goddard Space Center yesterday weren't even born when Apollo 11 landed on the moon 22 years ago.But that didn't stop them from launching their own model rockets at a contest yesterday that turned the space center into a launching pad for space shuttles, Titan missiles, Delta rockets and about 90 other models.The space center holds model rocket demonstrations every other Sunday, but yesterday's launches were part of the 10th Annual Model Rocket Contest organized to commemorate the first real moonwalk -- Neil Armstrong's small step for mankind, said Ed Pearson, the contest director.

MERRITT ISLAND, Fla. - Grabbing a burger to go at Shuttles Bar & Grill near the Kennedy Space Center, Ken MacKay gave a quick rundown on how tense it has been waiting to get the space shuttles flying again. "Every day you've got mixed emotions," said the 30-year-old electrical technician, who works at the space center. "It feels great to get another bird in the air. But, of course, there are also all those steps that have had to be taken to make everybody feel better about the launch." Almost 2 1/2 years since the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, the people at Kennedy Space Center and the surrounding area, commonly called the Space Coast, are impatient to resume manned space flight.

As NASA tries to make its work force match its goals, Goddard Space Flight Center is in strong shape and should avoid the heavy job cuts facing some other agency divisions, Director Edward J. Weiler said yesterday. "We don't see a major change in the civil service work force, in terms of numbers," Weiler said. "Goddard is actually well-positioned for the president's exploration vision. We've got a long tradition of solar system exploration." Goddard employs about 3,400 full-time federal workers.