NASA may postpone retirement of shuttle

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has ordered his top officials to study how the agency could fly the space shuttle beyond its planned retirement in 2010, according to an internal e-mail obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

The decision signals what could be a huge change in NASA policy. Griffin steadfastly opposed extending the shuttle era beyond its 2010 retirement date, arguing it could kill astronauts and cripple the agency’s fledgling Constellation program, a system of new rockets and capsules meant to replace the shuttle.

But geopolitics and political pressure are undermining his position.

The Russian invasion of neighboring Georgia has chilled relations between Washington and Moscow. The incursion has threatened NASA’s carefully laid plans to rely on Russian spaceships to ferry astronauts to the international space station during the years between the shuttle’s retirement and the maiden voyage of NASA’s next generation of rocket in 2015.

Anger over Russia’s actions has lawmakers clamoring for new ways to keep America’s space program independent of Moscow. Sen. John McCain earlier this week asked the White House to stop dismantling the shuttle program for at least a year to preserve the option of keeping Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour flying.

It is not something that Griffin wants to do. In April this year, he told a Senate panel: “If one were to do as some have suggested and fly the shuttle for an additional five years – say, two missions a year – the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew. That’s a high risk … (not one I would choose) to accept on behalf of our astronauts.”

But flying two shuttle flights a year until 2015 is exactly the kind of option NASA is now looking at, according to NASA officials and the e-mail sent Wednesday by John Coggeshall, Manifest and Schedules manager at Johnson Space Center in Houston

“The (Space Shuttle) program in conjunction with (Constellation) and (Space Station) have been asked by the administrator to put together some manifest options to assess extending shuttle flights to 2015,” Coggeshall wrote. “We want to focus on helping bridge the gap of US vehicles traveling to the (space station) as efficiently as possible,” he added.