Endeavour Home

The STS-127 mission ended successfully this morning with a safe landing at Kennedy Space Center, beating the summer storms that often develop later in the day in Florida. Those storms, in fact, twice delayed the launch of Endeavour on STS-127.

NASA has seven more scheduled shuttle missions, but the retirement date for the program is September, 2010. It's unlikely NASA will meet that date, and Congress is looking at shifting funds to extend the shuttle program into 2011. Doing that, however, would further delay the development of NASA's next manned space vehicle.

Congress and the Obama administration have not blinked at allocating hundreds of billions of dollars, and possibly much more, in an attempt to put the U. S. economy on sounder footing. Given that, making NASA shuffle much smaller sums among programs as it tries to accomplish all the goals Congress has set for it could suggest a lack of seriousness about space policy. If Congress and the Obama administration are not, in fact, serious enough about manned space exploration to give NASA the resources to do the job properly, they shouldn't be asking astronauts to risk their lives in the effort at all.