Space Program

THIRTY YEARS AGO this month, a man from Ohio took a walk on the moon. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, the eyes and ears of the folks back home on Earth followed his every bouncy step and static-laced word. On that night of triumph for imagination, bravery and technological skill, we could thrill to the idea that humankind was beginning a grand new adventure.By contrast, today's manned spaceflight program seems boringly routine. Few Americans notice the many launches that occur each year.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Forget for a minute the shaky science, the cynics, Hurricane Mitch, the threatening meteor shower and even the six cockroaches from Maryland that also will be on board.Today, with the world watching, John Glenn is scheduled to rocket away from Earth for the second time in his illustrious career and return to space as history's oldest astronaut.With blast-off set for 2 p.m., the shuttle Discovery is poised to carry Glenn, the 77-year-old Democratic senator from Ohio, and his six crew mates into orbit for the start of a nine-day mission.

More than the physics, more than even the fun details of how astronauts eat, sleep and go to the bathroom in space, payload specialist Roger K. Crouch wanted to leave the students of Westminster West Middle School with one important message yesterday.Never give up on your goal.Crouch, 57, went up in space twice this spring and summer on the shuttle Columbia. It was the culmination of a childhood dream hatched in a movie theater."I'm colorblind, so I could never be a real astronaut," Crouch said, referring to the career crew members who go on several missions.

If Space Center Houston is not currently on the top 10 list of places parents feel they have to take their children, it should be.Even two worldly teens were impressed. "S'OK," they muttered in unison, bobbing their heads a few millimeters for emphasis.The price of admission, $11.95 (adult fare), is a bargain by today's entertainment standards. A single ticket buys unlimited time in the Space Center Plaza -- a cavernous building filled with realistic space experiences, IMAX theater, a visit to the mission status center, a film shown in the Starship Gallery and two tours of the Johnson Space Center.

When NASA astronaut Dr. Daniel Barry delivers a speech tonight in Baltimore about the private commercial spinoffs and educational promise of the space program, he'll be preaching to more than a few believers.Among the throng of high-technology company executives gathering at the Greater Baltimore Committee's annual trade show and dinner to kick off its event-oriented High-Tech Month will be Joseph Fuller Jr., a former career employee and engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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."

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."

MOSCOW -- The crash Sunday of Russia's rocket to Mars was the latest sign of the humiliation that's become routine for this country's space program.A Burran space shuttle, part of a fleet that never got the funding to fly, is now an attraction for children at Gorky Park. Cosmonauts aboard the old Mir space station routinely must wait for the homeland to afford a flight home, and just a few weeks ago they had to suffer the stench of an overflowing sewage system.But Sunday's failure of the ambitious Russian Mars 96 mission was the most serious blow to the Russian space program since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Tom Underwood was ready to retire when he got a phone call that gave the 56-year-old veteran NASA engineer the chance to turn back time.It came from a top executive of AlliedSignal Technical Services Corp. in Columbia and included the offer of a job.But it was no ordinary job offer. It would give the graying grandfather the chance to relive the time when the U.S. space program was in its infancy and John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, was a national hero.Allied hired Mr. Underwood to head its efforts to land a big contract to develop and install the ground equipment that will collect data from the Taiwanese National Space Program's first satellite, scheduled to be launched in spring of 1998.

Tom Jones, a two-time Endeavour astronaut, dazzled students at Archbishop Curley High School with pictures from space and a film detailing the space shuttle's takeoff. But his real message during a visit to Baltimore yesterday was that students can accomplish anything if they refuse to give up."The space program turned me down three times before they would even interview me," said Dr. Jones, 39, who holds a doctorate in planetary science. The Essex native attended the Air Force Academy, was accepted into the space program in 1990 and flew two missions in 1994.

I was watching the bright half-moon last week, slowly fading in the light of the morning sun. The space program has grown opaque in the same way after two Apollo 11 astronauts first walked on the moon 40 years ago today. It even came to seem half a program. The shuttle stagecoaches in Earth orbit have attracted less and less national interest except when the Challenger exploded in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003. I was at Cape Kennedy four days before the Apollo 11 liftoff. In a predawn hour, Neil Armstrong, Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins walked past us going to work, carrying their air conditioners.

The Russian invasion of Georgia complicated what was already a major headache for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: how to get to and from the International Space Station, which was funded mostly by U.S. taxpayer dollars, after NASA's aging fleet of space shuttles retires in 2010. NASA expected Russian rockets to ferry its astronauts between 2010 and 2015, when the shuttle's replacement is due to fly. But a chill in U.S.-Russian relations could throw a monkey wrench into that plan.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- When space shuttle Challenger blew up, Barbara Morgan watched from a NASA viewing area as seven friends and colleagues - including fellow teacher Christa McAuliffe - plunged to their deaths. Seventeen years later, when Columbia disintegrated over Texas, Morgan was in a NASA plane waiting to escort the ship home. She had been scheduled to fly on its next mission. Now it's Morgan's turn to board a shuttle, and she is unfazed by past tragedies. When Endeavour lifts off - the launch is set for tomorrow - the teacher-turned-astronaut will be strapped into the orbiter and hurled skyward by almost 7 million pounds of thrust.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. - With the thunderous roar of 7.5 million pounds of thrust, equivalent to the power of a small nuclear device, America re-launched its era of space flight yesterday, sending seven astronauts into orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery. The exuberance surrounding the launch was tempered, however, when NASA engineers discovered three events that occurred during the 8.5-minute ride into space that raised concerns about the shuttle's heat shields, the critical system that was at fault in the Columbia accident 30 months ago. NASA officials said they would begin a detailed analysis of launch photography and a thorough in-orbit inspection of the craft using its robotic arm. NASA cameras and radar found that a 1.5-inch section of heat-resistant tile sheared off from the nose landing-gear door, damage they could not fully assess without more detailed inspection, said John Shannon, flight operations and integration manager.

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.

Seven lives, along with the fate of America's manned space program, the $100 billion International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope, are riding on Discovery today as the countdown for the first post-Columbia shuttle launch nears zero. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla., is scheduled for 3:51 p.m., but there is a 40 percent chance that showers or thunderstorms could postpone the launch, forecasters said late yesterday. Workers were replacing thermal tiles that were damaged yesterday when a cockpit window cover fell off the shuttle and struck a bulge in the fuselage.

WASHINGTON - President Bush chose Michael D. Griffin yesterday to be the new head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, putting a scientist with technical and management expertise in charge of the space program's ambitious plans to go back to the moon and on to Mars. Griffin, 55, who is director of the space department at the John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become the 11th administrator of NASA. But early congressional reaction was effusive.

WASHINGTON - As NASA begins to shift its focus toward President Bush's goal of more space exploration, the jobs of as many as 2,700 employees could be in doubt, a top agency official said yesterday. Some of those workers could find new jobs within the space program, and others might transfer. But an unknown number of positions will be eliminated by fall 2006, said James L. Jennings, who heads the institutions and management effort at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA has already been through one round of buyouts, and another round is expected in a few weeks as the changing priorities for the agency's 17,000 full-time workers take hold.

Thirteen months ago, President Bush stood before an audience at NASA headquarters in Washington and set what he said was a "new course" for the nation's space program. "We will give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration," he said. "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own. They were inspiring words -- echoes of President John F. Kennedy's challenge to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the nation in 1961 to land a man on the moon -- and calculated to shove a manned space program stuck in low-Earth orbit off toward the cosmos.

WASHINGTON -- As NASA works to return the space shuttle to flight, it is also facing a growing problem: when, and how, to stop upgrading a fleet that is headed for mothballs. In the aftermath of the February 2003 accident that destroyed the shuttle Columbia and killed seven astronauts, the space agency received a new agenda -- and a firm deadline to retire the remaining three orbiters when construction of the international space station is complete, sometime around the end of the decade.