Space Program

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

Expansion-minded rocket venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. may add a small Texas town on the Gulf of Mexico to its list of rocket launch sites. The Hawthorne company, better known as SpaceX, filed a document with the Federal Aviation Administration saying it was taking its first steps toward establishing a launch pad in Cameron County, Texas. SpaceX already has a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and is building a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara.

The first Wednesday of 1972 dawned uncommonly cold in Southern California. At San Clemente, a chill wind came up over the cliff from the Pacific, sweeping across Richard M. Nixon's putting greens and stirring the shrubs and rose bushes around the Western White House. At mid-morning, three men from Washington, who had come outside without coats, hurried along the walkways threading through the cluster of one-story buildings to the President's office.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, the rocket engine manufacturing business in the San Fernando Valley that helped pioneer space exploration in the 1960s, is officially up for sale by its parent company. With headquarters in Canoga Park, Rocketdyne builds rocket engines at a sprawling 47-acre facility near the Westfield Topanga shopping mall. The company is perhaps best known as the maker of the space shuttles' main rocket engines. But it also develops engines for military rockets and missiles.

I was pleased to read several recent opinion articles on the U.S. space program in The Times recently. They represent, perhaps, a wider appreciation of the sorrowful condition of this country's program. Since Apollo the government and public have relied on NASA to select the nation's goals in space. Apparently they were satisfied with the space shuttle, until the Challenger disaster. It is not, however, NASA's role to determine our future in space; that is the responsibility of the President and Congress.

For the last five years, the United States has been saddled with a space program that manages to be both unrealistic and uninspiring. It's unrealistic because it depends on funding and technology that are not available, and uninspiring because it proposes a mere repeat visit to the moon -- and not very soon at that -- and a trip to Mars that is way too far off to excite any young person alive today. Last week, a panel of former astronauts and space entrepreneurs convened by the Obama administration to review the 2004 program released its preliminary findings, which offer a way out of our space dilemma.

I am an eighth-grader at Aliso Viejo Middle School. Last year, when we spent a brief two weeks studying the space program in science, we learned all about the first mission into space. We followed the triumph of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they took that famous first step, and the missions to the moon following Apollo 11. After that, things seemed to come to a standstill. All we did was go around and around the Earth like a carousel. We put a space station up, but after visiting it a few times we just let it fall back into our atmosphere.

Apparently, some people were expecting a more subdued Newt Gingrich to emerge after two straight losses in the Republican presidential campaign. Nope. Coming off a double-digit shellacking in Nevada, a state Mitt Romney carried in 2008, Gingrich waved off the results as expected and vowed to press on despite a lack of debates in the coming weeks that might keep him in the spotlight. He's said he hopes to close Romney's widening delegate lead by the Texas primary in April. As he did after Saturday's caucuses, Gingrich railed against Romney on two Sunday morning TV shows, attacking the former governor's record leading Massachusetts.

Taking his campaign to Florida's space coast, Mitt Romney used the backdrop of an obsolete space module that once flew on the shuttle to call for a “new mission” for the U.S. space program and to accuse President Obama of failing to spur job growth as NASA initiatives have been scaled back. But the former Massachusetts governor offered few specifics about what that mission would be or how his approach would differ from President Obama's - beyond assembling a group to discuss the possible ideas.

Kaushik began shoplifting gum balls at age 7 and eventually graduated to carbonated beverages, books, expensive name-brand deodorant and hair gel, usually from high-end malls. He didn't need to swipe the merchandise; his family was comfortably middle class. But Kaushik, now 28, relished the adrenaline rush and his ability to look calm as his heart raced. "It's totally the thrill, the sense of power of hoodwinking the security," said the New Delhi media employee, who would give only his first name, adding that he had quit stealing six years ago. "I had no moral dilemma, only concern over the legal ramifications if I got caught.

  Russia's space program has a bad case of the Red Planet blues. As the NASA rover Curiosity, launched Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., streaks toward Mars, Russia's Phobos-Ground probe is marooned in near-Earth orbit and largely unresponsive to commands from ground controllers. Russian officials acknowledge that the narrow ballistic window for the spacecraft to reach Mars has closed, making it another in a series of failures for the country's space research. Since the retirement of the last space shuttle in July, U.S. astronauts heading to the International Space Station need to hitch a ride with the Russians, but officials say Russia's space program is suffering from worn-out equipment, a graying workforce and inability to attract a new generation of young specialists.

"War of the Worlds" H.G. Wells I thought that this was going to be a typical alien book with a happy ending. But it was realistic. I really liked it. It was very suspenseful There is this middle-aged man who looks into space a lot. One day, he sees an explosion of red gas on Mars. After about a week, Martians are on Earth and start killing people and eating them. The man travels to Boston and finds aliens dead because of water. The man is very smart and knows how to stay alive.

L.A.'s water visionary Re "Mulholland's Los Angeles," Editorial, July 10 Though he was a poor geologist (the St. Francis Dam disaster), William Mulholland's environmental legacy is remarkably positive. His 220-mile-long aqueduct is an engineering masterpiece, entirely gravity-fed. It produces hydroelectric power. Contrast this with the California State Water Project of the1970s, which expends more energy than any single operation in California to pump water over the Tehachapi Mountains.

I began covering the space shuttle project in 1972, soon after President Nixon authorized it. I had recently joined this newspaper as a science writer. And the country was enthusiastic about the idea of a reusable spacecraft, which was expected to be sturdy, economical and reliable. The shuttle turned out to be neither economical nor sturdy, and its reliability has been wobbly. But as I watched the shuttle Atlantis blast off into space on what will be the 135th and final space shuttle mission, I found myself feeling a bit nostalgic.

Reporting from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Atlantis lifted off Friday morning, shooting straight into a brightening sky on a 12-day mission that marks the end of the nation's three-decade space shuttle program. There was a brief hold in the countdown at 31 seconds because of a glitch seemingly involving a piece of retractable equipment. As millions of onlookers on the ground and via television held their breaths, officials checked and reported that the equipment had, indeed, been moved.