"Maybe there is a some possibility to launch by the spring, but I don't think anyone seriously thinks that the launch will be that soon, " said Norman Thagard, a former NASA astronaut and five-time shuttle flier.
Shuttle mission news is available from this page, beginning with STS-73 in October 1995 and updated each time the shuttle launches.
He is also a former two-time space shuttle astronaut, having flown in 2008 and 2009.
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Space shuttle Atlantis landed for the last time at Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. this morning.
Obama should make it clear that the space shuttle is ending, but at the same time Elon Musk, a South African immigrant, is launching Space X.
Before its 2003 retirement, the Concorde was long the shuttle of choice for executives eager to spend as little time as possible en route to Europe and unafraid to shell out thousands for a 3.5-hour trans-Atlantic flight.
The space station crew has been limited to two full-time residents since last year's suspension of space shuttle flights in the wake of the Columbia accident.
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And the percentage of all Americans, men and women, in work, is lower than it has been at any time since the early 1980s, when that first space shuttle was launched.
For the first time since entering the race, he has leased a plane big enough to shuttle reporters from one stop to the next as he tries to breathe new life into his shoestring campaign.
The last time he asked, I could only offer hopefully, "No, my shuttle's coming any minute".
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).
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"We have just started proximity talks, that is shuttle diplomacy, between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and for this announcement to come at that time was very destructive, " he said.
"This is the time when we have to say goodbye to our friends, our colleagues, the excellent crew of shuttle Atlantis that did an excellent job performing three EVAs, installing the new Russian module, having good fun, enjoying living on the station and working in space, " the ISS Expedition 23 commander Oleg Kotov told Ken Ham, who leads the Atlantis crew.
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