Shuttle contractor lays off 1,400 workers

United Space Alliance, which services NASA's space fleet, lets go employees in Florida, Texas and Alabama

By Associated Press

Topics:NASA, Ikea

The private contractor that handles the bulk of the work servicing NASA’s space shuttle fleet is notifying 1,400 employees in Florida, Texas and Alabama that they will be laid off in the fall.

United Space Alliance this week began telling workers, including 900 employees at the Kennedy Space Center, that they are expected to be let go by Oct. 1 as part of planned reductions from the end of the space shuttle program.

Laid off workers will receive between four and 26 weeks of pay, depending on their years of service.

The shuttle program now employs about 8,700 contractors, down from 12,000 employees in October 2008. It also employs another 1,200 civil workers, who are expected to be assigned to new programs after the shuttle.

The last shuttle flight is expected next year.

——

Information from: Florida Today, http://www.floridatoday.com

: More Associated Press

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The Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center for the last time early this morning

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press

Space Shuttle Atlantis lands at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Thursday, July 21, 2011. The landing of Atlantis marks the end of NASA's 30 year space shuttle program. (AP Photo/Don Emmert, Pool) (Credit: AP)

Topics:NASA

Atlantis and four astronauts returned from the International Space Station in triumph Thursday, bringing an end to NASA’s 30-year shuttle journey with one last, rousing touchdown that drew cheers and tears.

A record crowd of 2,000 gathered near the landing strip, thousands more packed Kennedy Space Center and countless others watched from afar as NASA’s longest-running spaceflight program came to a close.

“After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle’s earned its place in history. And it’s come to a final stop,” commander Christopher Ferguson radioed after Atlantis glided through the ghostly twilight and landed on the runway.

“Job well done, America,” replied Mission Control.

With the shuttle’s end, it will be another three to five years at best before Americans are launched again from U.S. soil, with private companies gearing up to seize the Earth-to-orbit-and-back baton from NASA.

The long-term future for American space exploration is just as hazy, a huge concern for many at NASA and all those losing their jobs because of the shuttle’s end. Asteroids and Mars are the destinations of choice, yet NASA has yet to settle on a rocket design to get astronauts there.

Thursday, though, belonged to Atlantis and its crew: Ferguson, co-pilot Douglas Hurley, Rex Walheim and Sandra Magnus, who completed a successful space station resupply mission.

Atlantis’ main landing gears touched down at 5:57 a.m. sharp, with “wheels stop” less than a minute later.

“The space shuttle has changed the way we view the world and it’s changed the way we view our universe,” Ferguson radioed from Atlantis. “There’s a lot of emotion today, but one thing’s indisputable. America’s not going to stop exploring.

“Thank you Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour and our ship Atlantis. Thank you for protecting us and bringing this program to such a fitting end.”

The astronauts’ families and friends, as well as shuttle managers and NASA brass, were near the runway to welcome Atlantis home. Difficult to see in the darkness, Atlantis was greeted with cheers, whistles and shouts. Soon, the sun was up and provided, finally, a splendid view. Within an hour, Ferguson and his crew were out on the runway and swarmed by well-wishers.

“The things that we’ve done have set us up for exploration of the future,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., a former shuttle commander. “But I don’t want to talk about that right now. I just want to salute this crew, welcome them home.”

Nine-hundred miles away, flight director Tony Ceccacci, who presided over Atlantis’ safe return, choked up while signing off from shuttle Mission Control in Houston.

“The work done in this room, in this building, will never again be duplicated,” he told his team of flight controllers.

At those words, dozens of past and present flight controllers quickly streamed into the room, embracing one another, wiping their eyes and snapping pictures.

NASA’s five space shuttles launched, saved and revitalized the Hubble Space Telescope; built the space station, the world’s largest orbiting structure; and opened the final frontier to women, minorities, schoolteachers, even a prince. The first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, became the oldest person ever in space, thanks to the shuttle. He was 77 at the time; he turned 90 this week.

Born with Columbia in 1981, it was NASA’s longest-running space exploration program.

“I haven’t cried yet, but it is extremely emotional,” said Karl Ronstrom, a photographer who helps with an astronaut scholarship fund. He witnessed the first shuttle launch as a teenager and watched the last shuttle landing as a middle-aged man.

It was truly a homecoming for Atlantis, which first soared in 1985. The next-to-youngest in NASA’s fleet will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a museum display.

This grand finale came 50 years to the day that Gus Grissom became the second American in space, just a half-year ahead of Glenn.

Atlantis — the last of NASA’s three surviving shuttles to retire — performed as admirably during descent as it did throughout the 13-day flight. A full year’s worth of food and other supplies were dropped off at the space station, just in case the upcoming commercial deliveries get delayed. The international partners — Russia, Europe, Japan — will carry the load in the meantime.

It was the 135th mission for the space shuttle fleet, which altogether flew 542 million miles and circled Earth more than 21,150 times over the past three decades. The five shuttles carried 355 people from 16 countries and, altogether, spent 1,333 days in space — almost four years.

Two of the shuttles — Challenger and Columbia — were destroyed, one at launch, the other during the ride home. Fourteen lives were lost. Yet each time, the shuttle program persevered and came back to fly again.

The decision to cease shuttle flight was made seven years ago, barely a year after the Columbia tragedy. President Barack Obama nixed President George W. Bush’s lunar goals, however, opting instead for astronaut expeditions to an asteroid and Mars.

Last-ditch appeals to keep shuttles flying by such NASA legends as Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Mission Control founder Christopher Kraft landed flat.

It comes down to money.

NASA is sacrificing the shuttles, according to the program manager, so it can get out of low-Earth orbit and get to points beyond. The first stop under Obama’s plan is an asteroid by 2025; next comes Mars in the mid-2030s.

Private companies have been tapped to take over cargo hauls and astronaut rides to the space station, which is expected to carry on for at least another decade. The first commercial supply run is expected late this year, with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launching its own rocket and spacecraft from Cape Canaveral.

None of these private spacecraft, however, will have the hauling capability of NASA’s shuttles; their payload bays stretch 60 feet long and 15 feet across, and hoisted megaton observatories like Hubble. Much of the nearly 1 million pounds of space station was carried to orbit by space shuttles.

Astronaut trips by the commercial competitors will take years to achieve.

SpaceX maintains it can get people to the space station within three years of getting the all-clear from NASA. Station managers expect it to be more like five years. Some skeptics say it could be 10 years before Americans are launched again from U.S. soil.

An American flag that flew on the first shuttle flight and returned to orbit aboard Atlantis on July 8, is now at the space station. The first company to get astronauts there will claim the flag as a prize.

Until then, NASA astronauts will continue to hitch rides to the space station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft — for tens of millions of dollars per seat.

After months of decommissioning, Atlantis will be placed on public display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. Discovery, the first to retire in March, will head to a Smithsonian hangar in Virginia. Endeavour, which returned from the space station on June 1, will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Ferguson said the space shuttles will long continue to inspire.

“I want that picture of a young 6-year-old boy looking up at a space shuttle in a museum and saying, ‘Daddy, I want to do something like that when I grow up.’ “

——

AP writers Mike Schneider at Cape Canaveral and Seth Borenstein in Houston contributed to this report.

——

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

: More Marcia Dunn

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Today's catch: A Tumblr site investigated by Secret Service, supermodel breastfeeding laws and Ron Swanson's meat

By Drew Grant

Topics:Pop five, NASA, Parks and Recreation, Sex, Teenagers, Viral Video, Television

1. Reviews of the day: A random “grab bag” of ridiculous Amazon reviews from Publishers Weekly. Can someone make a Tumblr of these?

2. Foodie of the day: Ron Swanson from “Parks and Recreation,” who can be seen here eating every kind of meat known to man.

: Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant

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NASA's last flight marks the end of an era, but for space geeks like me, it's a different kind of loss

By Matt Mendelsohn

A photo of the author's Major Matt Mason figurine.

Topics:NASA, Children, Life stories

With the final mission of the space shuttle looming on Friday, NASA puts a lid on five decades of U.S. space exploration with nary an ace left up its sleeve. Let’s face it, hitching future rides out of a launch facility in Kazakhstan doesn’t constitute a program so much as a glorified car service. And while some enthusiasts might feel a bit of a black hole each time they look skyward, I only need glance at the upper corner of my computer monitor to experience a sense of loss.

For the last 25 years, from the time I landed my first job out of college in 1986, the year Challenger went go at throttle up and then went no more, a small, bendable astronaut named Major Matt Mason has been perched atop my display.

Rescued long ago from the attic of my parent’s house on Long Island, not five miles from the Grumman Aerospace Corp., where the Apollo Lunar Module was built and where my father spent his days scrawling bizarre math figures resembling hieroglyphics on chalkboards located inside buildings I was rarely allowed to visit (“What do you do, Dad?” I once asked, and he replied, helpfully, “You wouldn’t understand.”), this little action figure — never call it a doll — has always been within reach.

His blue eyes fading under cracking paint, his rubber arm dangerously close to amputation, Major Matt looks down at me as I type, though lately I’m the one staring back wistfully. STS-135 may be the end of an era for NASA — for physicists, aeronautical engineers and tens of thousands of other folks who scored 800 on their math — but it’s the end of the line for us non-science space pretenders as well: those of us who don’t know their yaw from their pitch, who get nervous just hearing words like “geosynchronous orbit,” yet whose childhood is inextricably tethered, like Billy Mumy in the opening credits of “Lost in Space,” to all things astronaut.

Like so many other 7-year-olds in 1969, I wanted to be tethered to a capsule, too, right up until the day I rode the Long Island Rail Road into New York City with my grandfather, who, after opening some accounts at Republic Bank and securing some free toasters, took me to the top of the Empire State Building. Couple my newly discovered acrophobia with another crippling disease for a fledgling astronaut, not having a single scientific bone in my body, and my space years were numbered before they ever began.

But it’s impossible to have grown up near Bethpage, N.Y., during that time — in the shadow of Farmingdale’s Republic Aviation, builder of the mighty P-47 Thunderbolt, and a stone’s throw from Roosevelt Field, site of Lindbergh’s takeoff, and, most importantly, in a place that served as the universal answer to any local elementary school career-day question: What does your father do? He works at Grumman — and not come out the other end a space geek. On my block alone, two kids, not one, were building futuristic hovercraft in their garages. Paging Steven Spielberg.

That’s why this English major remembers what doomed Apollo 1 on the launch pad (the capsule was pressurized with pure oxygen), knows what the title of Michael Collins’ lunar memoir was (“Carrying the Fire”), and can still name with ease the original seven Mercury astronauts. Two C’s, two G’s and three S’s, my mental cheat sheet still at the ready. (Glenn and Grissom are easy, but the last “S” is a guaranteed trump card, as few people ever come up with Deke Slayton, and fewer still know that while even though he never flew a Mercury mission, Slayton finally got his chance in 1975 during Apollo-Soyuz.)

Aerospace so dominated life on Long Island that if you said you were from Bethpage, not a single person asked about the Black course or golf — only Grumman. The Black, host to two recent U.S. Opens, was in a bit of disrepair then, and thought of, at least by the under-12 set, only as a good place to sled in winter.

Grumman, on the other hand, was bustling. From the legendary Hellcat and Wildcat, powerhouses of the Pacific, to A-6 Intruders of the Vietnam era, the company was a larger-than-life presence in my hometown. For years I dreamed about knowing what was behind all those guard booths that dotted the massive campus, or what kinds of planes were landing at the airstrip off South Oyster Bay Road, excruciatingly blocked from public view by jet blast deflectors. In Plant 3, work was under way on wings for Grumman’s newest fighter, the F-14 Tomcat, the plane Tom Cruise would one day make into a sex symbol. Plant 5 was where the LEM was being built, the craft that would literally save the Apollo 13 astronauts and ensure Grumman’s place in space history. And deeper off Stewart Avenue, Plant 26, the computing sciences/artificial intelligence lab, where my father worked on his … well, I don’t have a clue.

Somehow all of this filtered down to us kids, the ones destined for MIT and the ones destined for Chaucer. Wearing the uniform of the day, plaid shirt matched with pants of long vertical stripes, I perused and re-perused the Estes model rocket catalog in bed, spending my allowance on spacecraft with names like Big Bertha and Citation. Painstakingly gluing and painting these rockets in a basement with no ventilation (“Is the window open?!?” my mother would yell down. “Yessssssss!!” I’d yell back, though in reality the basement window, with 20 bent, rusty nails going in every direction, would have required a regiment to open it), I watched as some of them actually attained altitude, though just as many got toppled by the wind moments before liftoff, taking healthy divots out of the Old Bethpage Grade School baseball diamond.

But more than anything else, we played with Mattel’s kid-toy masterpiece, Major Matt Mason, a 6-inch rubber astronaut figure wearing a helmet with an orange visor. Tom Hanks is an unabashed Matt man, and astronauts over the years have been rumored to have taken him into space with them. I used to pretend that he — me — was trapped with Penny Robinson, of the “Lost in Space” Robinsons, on the rocky surface of Alpha Centauri. I spent hours jury-rigging those flimsy arms, so much so that my playroom sometimes resembled astronaut triage — visors from other Matt Mason characters like Sgt. Storm being affixed to Doug Davis; legs from Lt. Jeff Long, an African-American astronaut action figure decades before a real-life one ever flew, attached to Major Matt. (Nowadays, Transformers and Bakugan toys regularly feature 379 pieces to potentially lose; Matt was as simple as they come.)

Four decades later, Major Matt has survived countless cleaning ladies, the occasional leaky ceiling, and many a move, when he and his rubber brethren are thrown back into their Satellite Locker, a vinyl carrying case I got as a consolation prize after my brother broke my arm in 1970, and carted off to a new base of operations.

My broken arm. My older brother Daniel snapped it while we were wrestling, and he wrote about the incident in a 2006 memoir about the Holocaust, of all things. To him, it was a metaphor for fraternal estrangement, for the distance between two young siblings — one who cared about model rockets and the other who would occasionally dress as an Egyptian pharaoh. But I saw past the cruelty then, and I see past it now. To me that broken arm was one of the great moments in my life. Without the fracture, my father, who is not an effusive gift-giver, might not have taken me to the five-and-dime and let me pick out any toy I wanted. And I went for the Major Matt Mason Satellite Locker.

The space program is grinding to a halt this week — no more T-minuses, no more astronaut walk-outs, no more boring but glorious shots of CAPCOMs hovered over computer screens. My link to it is long gone, too. My dad retired ages ago and Grumman was bought by Northrop in 1994, her Bethpage buildings reappropriated for other uses by other companies. The airstrip was built over, and cavernous Plant 5 is now a fledgling movie studio. I hear parts of “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie, were filmed there. Everywhere else, as far as my memory is concerned, tumbleweed might as well be blowing.

But Major Matt Mason lives on. Last month Tom Hanks announced a deal to make a big-screen movie about my favorite little action figure. But while a Hollywood movie ensures that a new generation of kids will come to know Major Matt, I kind of want him to myself, sitting up there on his perch above my monitor, that right arm forever waiting to break, just as mine did 41 years ago.

: Matt Mendelsohn is a writer and photographer living in Arlington, Virginia. He has worked at UPI and USA Today as a photojournalist, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and AOL News. More Matt Mendelsohn

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Recovering congresswoman stands, waves at NASA ceremony in Houston honoring her husband

By Associated Press

ADDS ADDITIONAL SOURCING INFORMATION - This most recent photo of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords since she was shot, was posted to her public Facebook page by her aides early Sunday, June 12, 2011. The woman in the background is her mother Gloria Giffords. The photo was taken May 17, 2011 at TIRR Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, the day after the launch of space shuttle Endeavour and the day before she had her cranioplasty. Giffords could be released from a rehabilitation hospital in Houston sometime this month, a top aide says, offering the latest indication that the Arizona congresswoman is making progress in recovering from a gunshot wound to the head. (AP Photo/southwestphotobank.com, P.K. Weis) MANDATORY CREDIT (Credit: AP)

Topics:Gabrielle Giffords, NASA

An aide to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords says she appeared in front of a crowd of hundreds at a NASA awards ceremony in Houston.

ABC News reported on its website Monday night that Giffords stood up from her wheelchair to hug and kiss her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, after he received the Spaceflight Medal.

ABC News says the 41-year-old Democrat from Tucson, Ariz., entered the auditorium at Space Center Houston while being pushed in the wheelchair. She smiled and waved at the crowd and received a standing ovation.

Giffords spokesman C.J. Karamargin confirmed that Giffords attended the ceremony.

Giffords has been in the Houston area undergoing rehabilitation since several weeks after the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson that left her and 12 others wounded and six people dead.

: More Associated Press

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Endeavour, commanded by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's husband, touched down early this morning

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press

A photo released by Nasa shows the Endeavour with a backdrop of a night time view of the Earth and the starry sky, while docked at the International Space Station on Saturday May 28, 2011. The STS-134 astronauts left the station the next day on May 29, after delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and performing four spacewalks during Endeavour's final mission. (AP Photo/NASA) (Credit: AP)

Topics:NASA, Gabrielle Giffords

Space shuttle Endeavour and its six astronauts returned to Earth on Wednesday, closing out the next-to-last mission in NASA’s 30-year program with a safe middle-of-the-night landing.

Endeavour touched down on the runway a final time under the cover of darkness, just as Atlantis, the last shuttle bound for space, arrived at the launch pad for the grand finale in five weeks.

Commander Mark Kelly — whose wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, remained behind at her rehab center in Houston — brought Endeavour to a stop before hundreds of onlookers that included the four Atlantis astronauts who will take flight in July.

The museum-bound Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles, logged nearly 123 million miles over 25 spaceflights.

“Your landing ends a vibrant legacy for this amazing vehicle that will long be remembered. Welcome home, Endeavour,” Mission Control told Kelly and his crewmates, who wrapped up U.S. construction at the International Space Station.

“It’s sad to see her land for the last time,” Kelly replied, “but she really has a great legacy.”

A considerably larger crowd gathered a few hours earlier to see Atlantis make its way to the launch pad, the last such trek ever by a shuttle. Thousands of Kennedy Space Center workers and their families lined the route Tuesday night as Atlantis crept out of the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building a little after sunset, bathed in xenon lights.

“The show pretty much tells itself,” Atlantis’ commander, Christopher Ferguson, said as he waved toward his ship. “We’re going to look upon this final mission as a celebration of all that the space shuttle has accomplished over its 30-year life span.”

Bright lights also illuminated the landing strip for Kelly, who made the 25th night landing out of a total of 134 shuttle flights.

The Endeavour astronauts — all experienced spacemen — departed the 220-mile-high outpost over the weekend. They installed a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, an extension beam and a platform full of spare parts, enough to keep the station operating in the shuttle-less decade ahead.

Their flight lasted 16 days and completed NASA’s role in the space station construction effort that began 12 years ago.

The official tally for Endeavour was 170 crew members, 299 days in space, 4,671 orbits of Earth and 122,883,151 miles.

Kelly was the last astronaut to exit Endeavour. He and his crew posed for pictures and signed autographs on the runway. Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff was so wobbly from weightlessness that he had to be supported by two colleagues.

“It’s great to bring Endeavour back in great shape. It looks like it’s ready to go do another mission,” Kelly said.

As Kelly thanked his crewmates for their flawless performance, co-pilot Gregory Johnson leaned over to shout into the mike, “And our commander, we want to thank him, too.” Johnson and the rest of the crew were openly supportive, over the months, about Kelly’s decision to stick with the flight, despite his wife’s serious injury.

Giffords was shot in the head during a mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in January, but made a remarkable recovery and was able to attend the May 16 launch. The congresswoman did not travel to Florida for the landing because of the inconvenient hour, but Kelly’s two teenage daughters were on hand, along with his twin brother, Scott, who is also an astronaut.

Giffords and Kelly will reunite in Houston on Thursday.

Their flight lasted 16 days and, with a series of four spacewalks, completed NASA’s role in the space station construction effort that began more than 12 years ago. They were the last spacewalks to be conducted by a shuttle crew. One of the spacewalking astronauts, Mike Fincke, set a U.S. career record of 382 days in space.

Endeavour is the second shuttle to be retired. It ultimately will be put at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Built to replace the destroyed Challenger, Endeavour first soared in 1992 on a satellite-rescue mission that saw a record-setting three spacewalkers grab the wayward craft. Other highlights for the baby of the fleet: the first repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, to fix its blurred vision, and NASA’s first flight to assemble the space station in 1998.

Atlantis will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a tourist stop, following one last supply run to the space station. Liftoff is set for July 8.

Discovery, the fleet leader, returned from its final voyage in March. Its next stop is a Smithsonian Institution hangar outside Washington.

NASA is leaving the Earth-to-orbit business behind to focus on expeditions to asteroids and Mars. Private companies hope to pick up the slack for cargo and crew hauls to the space station. But it will be a while following Atlantis’ upcoming flight — at least three years, by one business’ estimate — before astronauts ride on American rockets again.

Until then, Americans will continue hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz capsules at the cost of tens of millions of dollars a seat.

“We’re in the process of transition now, and it’s going to be awkward,” said Atlantis astronaut Rex Walheim. “But we’ll get to the other side and we’ll have new vehicles.

“I really do have to say, though, it’s going to be really hard to beat a vehicle that is so beautiful and majestic as that one is,” he said as Atlantis rolled to the pad behind him. “I mean, how can you beat that? An airplane sitting on the side of a rocket. It’s absolutely stunning.”

——

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission–pages/shuttle/main/index.html