The nation's eyes are on the space shuttle launch Friday as gravely injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords sends her strapping astronaut husband Mark Kelly into space.
By Chris O'Meara, AP
Mark Kelly, commander of the space shuttle Endeavour, arrives at Kennedy Space Center with his fellow crew members in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday. Kelly's wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, left Houston for Cape Canaveral late Wednesday morning.
By Chris O'Meara, AP
Mark Kelly, commander of the space shuttle Endeavour, arrives at Kennedy Space Center with his fellow crew members in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday. Kelly's wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, left Houston for Cape Canaveral late Wednesday morning.
This next-to-last shuttle flight, unremarkable but for an endearing love story of a congresswoman and an astronaut, is drawing unparalleled public and media interest. Even President Obama and his family will travel to Florida's Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch.
Space program analysts say the flurry of interest is an aberrant blip destined to fade as NASA spends the next decade focused on engineering instead of derring do. After the last space shuttle flies its last mission in June and all four shuttle vehicles are mothballed, manned spaceflight ? NASA's most dramatic program ? takes a long hiatus while NASA scientists and engineers attempt the next big thing on a tight budget.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., an astronaut who served as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Columbia, says NASA's potential is unlimited.
"We're going to Mars," he says.
In a speech last year, Obama said NASA's astronauts will go first to an asteroid and then to Mars. Congress in October authorized money for National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop a heavy lift rocket with the goal of sending astronauts to Mars in 2030.
"The destination and the timetable are still very much in the air," says veteran space analyst Marcia Smith, editor of SpacePolicyOnline.com and former director of the Space Studies Board at the National Academy of Sciences.
The space shuttle Endeavour will leave earth for the last time at 3:47 p.m. Friday under Kelly's command. The crew's most important task on its 14-day mission to the International Space Station is to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2, a particle physics detector that searches for unusual sub-atomic matter.
Gabrielle Giffords U.S. Congresswoman, D-Ariz.
Office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords Endeavour will also deliver spare parts to the space station, including antennae, circuit breaker boxes and an extra arm for the Dextre robot. Crewmembers will take four spacewalks and complete a long list of chores, including swapping out experiments and doing maintenance on the station.
The experiments are exciting, Nelson says. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will conduct "one of the most sophisticated astronomical experiments around," he says. "It'll absorb cosmic rays. As a result of this, we think we will have a chance of understanding the origins of the universe."
Still, he concedes that it's not the spectrometer that has captured the public's imagination.
The mission "is getting an enormous amount of attention because of Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords, as it should be," Nelson says.
Giffords has been hospitalized since she was shot in the head Jan. 8 while meeting constituents at a Tucson supermarket. Kelly spent weeks at her bedside in a Tucson hospital. Giffords transferred to a rehabilitation hospital in Houston in part so Kelly could resume his mission training.
The couple met on a fellowship to China in 2003 and married in November 2007. Their relationship had often been long distance, as Kelly trained in Houston for his shuttle missions and Giffords traveled between her Arizona congressional district and her duties in Washington. Since they met, she has never missed his launches.
Giffords will attend the launch Friday, watching from a private viewing area inaccessible to the public and media. Kelly, who arrived at Kennedy Space Center Tuesday to prepare for the launch, said he was happy his wife could be there for his last shuttle flight. Kelly has flown three previous missions, twice as a pilot and one as commander.
Media requests are up 70% ? to about 1,500 ? from the previous launch, says NASA spokesman Allard Beutel. He attributes the increased media focus to a number of factors: Giffords, the second-to-last shuttle launch and the president's visit.
The public has also shown interest in the launch, which is scheduled at a family-friendly afterschool time. Kennedy Space Center can accommodate 40,000 people, he said.
"We expect a large crowd outside the gates," Beutel said. "Kids love coming to see the space shuttle."
Giffords is happy about any attention to the space program, says her spokesman C.J. Karamargin.
Karamargin visited with Giffords last week at the Houston rehabilitation hospital. While there, Karamargin received the email confirming that Obama and his family would attend the launch. Karamargin charged into Giffords' hospital room to announce the news.
"It was a great moment," he said. "She smiled broadly and said, 'Awesome.' The president has the power to draw national attention to the space program."
"The congresswoman is one of the most ardent champions of the space program in Congress because of the power it has shown through its history to ignite the curiosity and imagination of America's school children," Karamargin said.
The shuttle program, however, has not ignited the American passion for space the way the Apollo missions once did.
"The shuttle's whole purpose was to make spaceflight routine. It's not jazzy," Smith says. "People don't pay attention until there's some big discovery or some sort of tragedy."
The final space shuttle mission, the launch of Atlantis, is June 28. It, too, will deliver supplies and spare parts to the space station. After that, the shuttles will be delivered to museums. U.S. astronauts will hitch rides to the space station on Russian vehicles, while commercial companies, with seed money from NASA, develop new rockets to transport astronauts into low earth orbit.
"NASA will still have astronauts full time off the planet and on the space station" conducting more than 150 experiments, Beutel said.
It's not at all clear where U.S. manned space program will go next and how it will get there.
The moon, Obama said a year ago in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, is off the table. "We've been there before," Obama said then. "There's a lot more space to explore."
Obama challenged NASA to design a new "heavy lift" rocket tht can send a crew capsule, propulsion system and large quantities of supplies into deep space by 2016
"By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space," he said. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history."
Obama's timetable sends humans to orbit Mars and return safely to earth by the mid-2030s, followed by landing on Mars.
The Mars plan "will rekindle the interest in doing superhuman things like the excitement generated" by the Apollo missions, Nelson said.
The plans are ambitious and will be costly.
The U.S. Human Spaceflight Committee, convened by the White House in 2009 to consider the future of human spaceflight and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, concluded the resources allocated to U.S. space exploration fell short of the national aspirations.
"There's no way we're going to have the budget we had during the Apollo era," Beutel says. "We'd love to accelerate the technology, but we've got work within the reality of the budget. It may take us a while to get there, but we're going to get there."
Congress authorized $19 billion for the space program in 2011, $19.45 billion in 2012 and $19.96 billion in 2013.
"People like the shuttle program, they like human spaceflight, they like NASA, they just don't like to pay for it," says Roger Launius, senior curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum who served as chief NASA historian from 1990 to 2002.
The human drama of manned spaceflight helps draw the public to the space program, Launius says. Without a narrative, Launius says, it's hard for people to make a connection.
The combination of Giffords' extraordinary story and the end of the shuttle program has swelled interest and may ultimately help boost political support, said John Logsdon of the George Washington University Space Policy Institute.
"It's going to cause a lot of attention," he said. "It almost forces the president to say something about space."
For Giffords, the launch marks a personal milestone.
"She did not want to miss this event. This is something she must do," Karamargin said. "It's a goal she's been working toward. We're hopeful that the great strides she has made since Jan. 8 will get a great boost from this."
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