NASA pullout could cut 'hope' short
Who will handle the space station after NASA departs?
— -- The space shuttle Discovery, scheduled for liftoff Saturday, will take to orbit a project nearly 25 years and $1 billion in the making: one of the biggest laboratories ever built for the International Space Station.
Excitement over the launch is tempered by concern that the lab's mission may be cut short if NASA follows through on its plan to withdraw from the station after 2015.
Named Kibo, which means "hope" in Japanese, the space lab is designed to last at least 10 years and could probably be used for 20, says Yoshinori Yoshimura of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which built the lab. NASA's withdrawal from the space station could lead the lab to prematurely shut down.
Besides Japan and the United States, 12 other nations have invested in the station. NASA has been responsible for 75% of the $157 billion cost of building and operating the 10-year-old station, according to the European Space Agency. It "does not seem feasible" that other nations could fill NASA's shoes, says Cristina Chaplain of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress.
Withdrawing from the station for lack of money a few years after finishing it is "like buying a new car and saying, 'You paid $40,000 for a new car, and now I can't put the gas in the tank,' " said former senator John Glenn, the first American in orbit, during a Capitol Hill visit this month.
The space agency has made no final decisions.
NASA's space-operations chief William Gerstenmaier said last month that NASA has "done nothing to preclude" U.S. participation in the station beyond 2015. He said if NASA does want to continue research on the station, "we need to do that planning now."
NASA wants to end its commitment to the space station, so it can use the money — about $2 billion a year — to return humans to the moon.
If NASA were to pull out of the station in 2015 without getting its partners' approval, "there would be a lot of problems," says Alan Thirkettle, station manager for the European Space Agency.
