The position, which was first created and held by Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton in 1962, oversees the activities of the astronaut corps, including managing training programs, appointing technical assignments and choosing the crews for upcoming space missions.
MSN: NASA names space shuttle veteran as new chief astronaut
California proposed putting more inmates on firefighting crews and into space leased from county jails to help meet a court-mandated requirement that it reduce its state-prison population, in a plan California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed Thursday night.
After Columbia broke apart with the loss of seven astronauts in February, NASA grounded the orbiter fleet, forcing the United States and its international partners to rely on smaller Russian Soyuz spacecraft to deliver cargo and crews to the space station.
Under current plans, this would see the vehicle ferrying crews to the International Space Station (ISS) the following year.
Endeavour has brought home Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who has spent 138 days in space and has been a member of three separate space station crews.
The air lock installation is the primary objective of the Atlantis mission, with the two-room chamber allowing space station crews to venture from the station in NASA spacesuits without the assistance of visiting shuttles.
The two space station crews, along with the four Discovery astronauts, continued unloading supplies from the Italian-built Leonardo cargo module, a shiny giant cylinder that the shuttle crew attached to the space station on Monday.
The two space station crews, along with the four Discovery astronauts, have finished unloading supplies from the Italian-built Leonardo cargo module, a shiny giant cylinder that the shuttle crew attached to the space station on Monday.
Behnken has inherited the position at a time of transition for the astronaut corps, as NASA looks beyond its retired space shuttle program toward hiring U.S. companies to fly its crews on private spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).
MSN: NASA names space shuttle veteran as new chief astronaut
We continued to a backstage area where mail trucks shared space with production crews at banks of monitors tracking the party already under way, as well as Mr. Craig's progress.
Each of these crews embarked on a journey into space to learn more about who we are and what we bring to each other as human beings.
That optimistic timeline had been offered by numerous NASA managers, who would like to resume shuttle flights to the international space station soon to send crews and components to the unfinished orbiting outpost.
And we have much to learn about their long-term effects before human crews can venture through the vast voids of space for months at a time.
CNN: Bush: 'It is time for America to take the next steps' in space
The timeline envisaged by Nasa means routine Orion trips to the International Space Station (ISS) to exchange crews are unlikely to occur before 2016.
Earlier this week, a senior Russian space official was quoted by a news agency as saying that delays to the schedule of US shuttle launches to the space station were resulting in extra work for Russian rocket crews without financial compensation.
Shuttle crews and the scientists and engineers who support them have helped build the International Space Station.
CNN: Bush: 'It is time for America to take the next steps' in space
There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space.
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