NASA’s Space Shuttle Program Retirement Delayed Until 2011
July 3rd, 2010 - 1:44 am ICT by Angela Kaye MasonJuly 2 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The Space Shuttle ‘Endeavor’ was scheduled to make the last mission in NASA’S spaceshuttle history in November of 2010, when it was all set to take off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, but that final launch has now been postponed until February of 2011.
The final flight of the spaceship ‘Discovery’, which being prepared for September of 2010, has also been rescheduled and will now take place in November, if all goes according to plan. The decision to cancel NASA’s space shuttle program was made while former president George W Bush was still in office, by his administration, partially due to the January 28,1986 explosion of the spaceshuttle ‘Challenger’ when it re entered the earth’s atmosphere, that killed seven crew members, one of which was the first teacher in space.
President Obama decided to go ahead with the planned cancellation, but also dropped a Bush initiative which would have placed astronauts back on the moon before 2020, in a new system which would comprise the Orion crew capsule and the Ares rocket. But Obama’s current fiscal plans ditch the Ares and makes Orion into an emergency lifeboat which would be docked constantly at the International Space Station.
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Tags: ares, astronauts, cancellation, crew members, ditch, emergency lifeboat, first teacher, fiscal plans, former president, george w bush, international space station, kennedy space center, launch, nasa, obama, president george w bush, space shuttle endeavor, space shuttle program, spaceship discovery, spaceshuttle challenger