NASA is working with several companies to develop vehicles to replace the shuttles. Until then, Russian Soyuz spacecraft will carry Americans to and from the space station. Russian, European and Japanese cargo spacecraft will continue their resupply and waste disposal flights to the orbiting laboratory.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The space station is in low-Earth orbit. NASA will turn its attention to deep space.
Space exploration creates science. But the space program also creates jobs. For the shuttle program, NASA came to depend mostly on workers from private companies instead of government employees. The remaining several thousand contractors have no guarantee of work now that the program is over.
Last year Congress ordered NASA to develop a new Space Launch System that could be powerful enough to rocket crews into deep space. But some in Congress want to cancel plans for the next-generation replacement for the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, named for a former NASA chief, is late and over budget.
President George W. Bush set a goal to return to the moon by twenty twenty, as the launching point for missions farther into space. President Obama canceled those plans. He announced his own plan for space exploration in a speech last year at the Kennedy Space Center.
President Barack Obama with Apollo 11 astronauts, from left, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong, at the White House in 2009, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25