14 DAY TRIAL // Policymakers in the United States are currently struggling to pass legislation that would ensure the operation of the nation's shuttle fleet even beyond 2010. More specifically, US House and Senate representatives are struggling to eliminate the deadline for the retirement of the shuttles, currently scheduled for 2010, and to award the American space agency another $2.5 billion, which would be enough to pay for a few additional flights in 2011. The final vote on the matter is scheduled to take place sometime during this week, but opinions on the matter are divided right down the middle.
Advocates of the decision say that having more room to operate means a clearer launch schedule for NASA. If the agency had more time at its disposal to plan the launches, then they wouldn't be so close to one another, and engineers would have more time to check for potential flaws in the space shuttles. Proponents also say that such a decision would help avert accidents similar to that of Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003), which some attribute to a tightly packed launch schedule.
In addition, if the resolution gets passed, some 3,500 direct jobs at the Kennedy Space Center could be preserved, as well as thousands of others in related sectors, and at various contractor firms. Flying the shuttles until 2011 would also reduce the gap left between the planned retirement of the spacecraft and the development of the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle by a year, as well as that of all the other instruments in the Constellation Project. They include the Altair Lunar Lander and the ARES delivery system family.
Florida officials fear that cutting jobs at KSC could result in a more pronounced economic downturn throughout the area. Some correctly draw attention to the fact that the experts working at the spaceport are some of the most highly skilled professionals in the world at what they do, and that losing them could spell disaster for future American space projects. The representatives also say that the United States have no other experts to replace the KSC ones with, and that they should be kept aboard no matter the costs.