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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: NASA Starts Planning to Retire Space Shuttle NASA Starts Planning to Retire Space Shuttle By WARREN E. LEARY ASHINGTON, April 1 - Even as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration prepares to resume flights of the space shuttle, the agency has begun forming detailed plans to retire the spacecraft in five years, if not before, a top NASA official said on Friday. The official, Michael Kostelnik, the agency's deputy associate administrator for the shuttle and the International Space Station programs, said he had established a special group within his office to deal with retiring the shuttle. Agency leaders decided to create a separate entity to deal with shuttle retirement issues so there would be no conflict of interest with the flight program, Mr. Kostelnik said in a telephone briefing with reporters. Within a year or so, Mr. Kostelnik said, NASA will have to start the shuttle retirement process in earnest, moving toward canceling contracts for shuttle-related supplies, decommissioning some sites and redirecting or eliminating some of the work force. "Transitioning these resources is a very complex problem," he said. He added that after reviewing assets and work needs, NASA should begin within a year to terminate some contracts for items like the shuttle's external fuel tank and start planning how to mothball equipment and structures used by the shuttle. It would be premature to end shuttle activities until NASA determines how many more shuttle flights are needed to complete the space station and how many flights can be made each year before the planned end of the program in 2010, Mr. Kostelnik said. As part of President Bush's vision for NASA that he announced last year, the shuttle is to resume flying until 2010, when it is scheduled to complete the station, then be retired. The plan also calls for the United States to stop using the station by 2017 and to redirect resources from both programs to new space vehicles for exploring the Moon and Mars. The nation's fleet of three shuttles has been grounded since the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003. After the program is revamped and the spacecraft are modified, and if all recommendations made by Columbia accident investigators have been carried out, shuttles are to resume flights between May 15 and June 3. Mr. Kostelnik acknowledged that it was taking NASA longer than expected to complete all the reviews of design and procedural changes, as well as the necessary paperwork and documentation required to satisfy a special panel overseeing compliance with the recommendations. It will take at least another two weeks to gather this information and deliver it to the oversight panel, which is headed by the former astronauts Thomas P. Stafford and Richard O. Covey, he said. "Everybody would have liked to have had this work completed sooner," Mr. Kostelnik said. "But it's just kind of the way it is, and we're not going to cut short any of these milestones just to make an arbitrary date." The Stafford-Covey panel on Wednesday indefinitely put off what was to be its final meeting to assess NASA's return-to-flight progress, saying it could not proceed without the necessary data. The group has said it wants to deliver its final report on compliance at least a month before the first flight.
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