NASA sets date for final shuttle mission

NASA has tentatively set the final space shuttle mission for May 31, 2010, four months before the shuttle fleet is scheduled to retire.

NASA has 10 missions remaining for the fleet, which President George W. Bush ordered to retire by Sept. 30, 2010. The schedule, announced late Monday and reported in the Houston Chronicle, includes five flights this year, five in 2009 and three in 2010.

Some members of Congress want to add at least one more mission, to carry the $1.6-billion US Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station. The mission was one of about a dozen cancelled after Columbia broke apart upon re-entry in 2003.

NASA told a Senate panel on June 23 that it anticipates losing 3,000 to 4,000 jobs at its launching site once the space shuttles stop flying in two more years, about half the cutback initially reported.

Although as many as 6,000 to 7,000 shuttle jobs will be eliminated at Kennedy Space Center, about 3,000 positions will open up in the new exploration program, said NASA administrator Michael Griffin. Those jobs will be created to build and fly the new Ares rocket and Orion capsule to the international space station and, ultimately, to the moon.

It's expected to be 2015 — five years after the last shuttle flight — before NASA's new rocketship is ready to blast off with astronauts. The United States will have to rely on Russians to get Americans to the space station during those five years. It would have taken significantly more money to get the new rocketship ready earlier and narrow the five-year gap, Griffin said.