Budget woes bring NASA back to Earth

wholesale electronics suppliers Houston's Johnson Space Center confronts mounting long-term uncertainty as the White House and Congress flat-line NASA's spending and elected officials cast about for a galvanizing rationale to expand manned space exploration.

The showcase shuttle program that relies on JSC's Mission Control is down to its last two flights. On Friday, the primary shuttle contractor, United Space Alliance, announced it will lay off 800 of its 2,200 employees in the greater Houston area shortly after NASA retires the fleet later this summer.

And the job cuts come on the same week that Texans, who lost a bid to "bring the shuttle home" for public display in Houston, have been reduced to fashioning a quixotic campaign to wrest a retired shuttle orbiter from one of the four rival locations that won the competition on Tuesday. wholesale Android Tablets

The compromise on spending that worked its way through Congress on Thursday promised $18.5 billion to NASA for the current fiscal year, less than what the space agency got last year and what Congress initially authorized for this year.

And it was a precursor to White House plans to begin each year's budget bargaining for the next five years with the same steady request for $18.7 billion.

The measure cleared the way for the Obama administration to formally end the back-to-the-moon Constellation program and turn to developing commercial spacecraft to service the International Space Station so NASA can focus on next-generation technology for astronauts' eventual deep-space exploration to asteroids and Mars.