Discovery Home Safely

Ending a near-perfect mission with a textbook landing yesterday, space shuttle Discovery returned safely to Cape Kennedy.

There are now only ten more planned shuttle missions. The next one will be the final Hubble repair mission, slated for October. After the Columbia tragedy, NASA had cancelled that mission as being too dangerous, but pressure from the science community and the general public led NASA to reinstate the flight. The remaining flights will focus on supplying and finishing construction of ISS before the shuttle is retired in 2010. That will require a fairly aggressive flight schedule. There is a possibility that Congress could extend the program for a year or so, but the budgetary implications of such an extension for NASA's other programs could easily be negative.

At some point, the U. S. will have to move beyond the shuttle. It's probably best not to drag that move out any longer.