FOR the past three years, NASA’s launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, have mostly sat idle, with technicians working to battle corrosion rather than prepare space shuttles for blast-off. And later this year, when one of the launch pads is shut down for routine maintenance, it may never return to service.
To save $30 million, NASA managers are recommending that the agency scale back to just one launch pad for the remaining shuttle flights. This is just one of the measures NASA is considering in order to realise President Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration”, which envisages an end to shuttle flights after…
