Space Shuttle Extension Proposal Gains Ground

By Irene Klotz

July 15, 2010

CAPE CANVERAL, Fla. — The external fuel tank earmarked for the STS-134 flight of shuttle Endeavour, currently the final mission of the space shuttle program, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center on July 13, but commemorations may be premature.

A bill that adds at least one flight — and possibly more — to the shuttle’s manifest is scheduled to be discussed at a meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on July 15. The plan, which allots $1.6 billion for shuttle operations for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, also directs NASA to refurbish the external fuel tank set aside after the 2003 Columbia accident, designated ET-94.

Preparing the tank for flight would take between a year and 18 months, says Harry Wadsworth, spokesman with contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility outside New Orleans. “We’ve been using it as a test article. It’s welded, but it would take a lot of renovation at this point. It was made some time ago. It was supposed to be the tank [to fly] after Columbia,” Wadsworth said.

A draft of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, submitted by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, directs NASA to prepare ET-94 to be used in developing a new heavy-lift Space Launch System as a “critical skills and capability retention effort” or for use on a contingency space shuttle mission to the space station.

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