The Flight Readiness Review (FRR) for the final space shuttle launch, STS-135 (Atlantis), will take place on June 28. NASA will hold a press conference when it is finished to announce the launch date officially. Currently it is targeted for July 8 at 11:26 am EDT.

The press conference will be aired on NASA Television when the FRR concludes. Follow NASA’s Twitter feed or check back here for updates during the day.

The four person STS-135 crew is composed of Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim. Four is the minimum number of crew needed to fly the shuttle and NASA is keeping the crew number at the minimum in case anything goes awry and they have to use the International Space Station (ISS) as a safe haven. There will be fewer mouths to feed and fewer people to return to Earth on extra Soyuz spacecraft with only four shuttle crew members instead of the usual complement of six or seven.

Meanwhile, astronaut Mark Kelly announced today that he will retire from NASA. Kelly just returned from commanding STS-134 (Endeavour). His wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), was recently released from TIRR-Memorial Hermann rehabilitation hospital in Houston. She is living at Kelly’s home near Johnson Space Center, TX, but this past weekend was able to return to her district in Tucson, AZ for a visit. Her recovery from being shot in the head during an assassination attempt on January 8 continues to amaze and delight her friends, family, fans, and constituents. Kelly and Giffords reportedly have begun work on a joint memoir.

Kelly’s retirement is effective October 1. With no more space shuttle launches, and any new U.S. crew space transportation system — commercial or government — not due for many years, the astronaut ranks are expected to continue to shrink. U.S. astronauts will still go to the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but the six crew positions on the ISS are filled not only by Americans, but Russians, Europeans, Japanese and Canadians. The opportunities for spaceflight will be very limited for an indefinite number of years.

The following events may be of interest in the coming week. Check our calendar on the right menu or click the links below for more information. Times and dates for congressional activities are subject to change; check the relevant committee’s website for up to date information. All times are EDT unless otherwise noted.

During the Week

The House and Senate are both in session this week. Meanwhile, the Paris Air Show takes place at Le Bourget, France.

Monday-Wednesday, June 20-22

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Heliophysics Subcommittee, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC
  • June 20, 9:00 am – 5:30 pm , room 9H40
  • June 21, 9:00 am – 5:30 pm, room 8R40
  • June 22, 9:00 am – 1:00 pm, room 3H46

Tuesday, June 21

• Space Weather Enterprise Forum, National Press Club, Washington, DC, 7:30 am – 5:00 pm
• NASA teleconference on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter results and future, 2:00 pm, virtual (listen at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio)
• International Space University lecture featuring former NASA Kennedy Space Center Director Jay Honeycutt, Westin Grand Hotel, Washington, DC, 5:30 pm

Tuesday-Friday, June 21-24

• International Academy of Astronautics Low Cost Planetary Missions conference, Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, MD

Wednesday, June 22

• Women in Aerospace Top Issues In Space Law panel, Honeywell offices at 101 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 8:30 – 10:00 am
• House SS&T Committee hearing on NOAA“s Proposal Climate Service, 2318 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC, 10:00 am
• Secure World Foundation/Project Poughshares release of 2011 Space Security Index, Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC, 10:00 am
• Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing with public witnesses, 192 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC, 10:30 am
• NASA Advisory Council Planetary Science Subcommittee, virtual (telephone and WebEx), 11:30 am – 4:00 pm

Thursday, June 23

• House Transportation and Infrastructure hearing on GPS Reliability (including Lightsquared issue), 2167 Rayburn House Office Building, 9:00 am

The waiting will soon be over according to NASASpaceflight.com. NASA will at last announce its plans for the Space Launch System (SLS) before the final shuttle launch, now scheduled for July 8.

Congress has been increasingly impatient waiting for NASA to make a decision on the SLS, which it directed the agency to build in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act. According to the NASASpaceflight.com website, NASA Administrator Bolden has signed off on a vehicle design. Quoting from a memo, the website describes a vehicle that will have an 8.4 meter core and upper stage, RS-25 engine for the core stage, J-2X engines on the upper stage, and 4 or 5 segment solid rocket boosters for initial flights.

Ensuring the continuity of data streams from earth observation satellites and changing the framework of the debate over climate change were key messages from yesterday’s Forum for Earth Observations V. The Forum was sponsored by the Alliance for Earth Observations and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies.

Focusing on the need to create a national strategy for environmental intelligence, the day-long meeting brought together business and government representatives to talk about the importance of sustained environmental observations. There was a general understanding that today’s economic situation means that everyone must do more with less. Nonetheless, speakers emphasized that such data are needed not only for research into climate change and government intelligence analyses of global changes in supplies of food, water and energy, but also to support businesses like the insurance industry.

Although the meeting’s emphasis was on satellite observations, William Vass of Liquid Robotics reminded the audience that the Earth is 70 percent ocean and robotic platforms that can operate autonomously at sea for two years, like those developed by his company, are another method of obtaining data.

One business use of remote sensing data highlighted at the Forum was the insurance industry. Carl Hedde of Munich RE reviewed the worldwide natural disasters that have occurred just in the first five months of 2011 — from earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan to tornadoes and floods in the United States. Insured losses in the United States alone from these events total more than $11 billion, he said. His company thinks climate change is one factor in the weather-related events and is investing in climate change research itself.

Climate change is an emotional topic. Sharon Hays, Vice President for the Office of Science and Engineering at CSC and a former congressional and White House staffer, called for a new way to communicate about climate change issues. “What we’re doing doesn’t work,” Hays stressed. Too much attention is focused on whether it is human induced or natural instead of what needs to be done to adapt to it, she said.

Another key message was the need for public-private partnerships between businesses and the government to effectively utilize environmental data. Engaging with corporate executives to help them understand the impact climate change could have on their businesses is one step that is needed, Hays pointed out. “Did you know that all of our data centers are located in the same 100 year flood plain?” she asked. What happens when that becomes a 50 year flood plain, or 25 year flood plain is critical to businesses. She challenged the audience to think about “how we shift the debate,” and “how do we stimulate the climate service industry?”

Hays was on Capitol Hill in 1996 just after Republicans took control of the House after decades in the minority. She recalled that doubling funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was a big issue at the time. Increasing NIH funding to that extent “seemed like fantasy,” but what persuaded the Republican leadership, including then-Speaker and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was hearing from biotech and other companies about how that government investment would create jobs. It was not about scientists and the data they needed. The key is appealing to “pocketbook issues,” she said, and harnessing non-traditional users of environmental observations to make them advocates for that data — “Then we start to change the debate.”

The meeting was a love fest for the venerable Landsat series of medium resolution land imaging data. The first Landsat was launched by NASA in 1972. The most recent, Landsat 7, has been in orbit since 1999. It and Landsat 5 (1984) continue to operate with partial capabilities well past their design lifetimes. The need to ensure continuity of that data series was stressed throughout the day by speakers both from the public and private sectors. Many also heralded the 2008 U.S. Government decision to make Landsat data freely available to anyone.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), part of the Department of the Interior (DOI), manages distribution and archiving of Landsat data and its role in the program will change dramatically if Congress agrees. David Hayes, Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), enthusiastically told the audience that in the FY2012 budget request his department has proposed taking over the Landsat program “lock, stock and barrel” from NASA. The budget request proposes that USGS not only take the primary role for the next in the series, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) or Landsat 8 – scheduled for launch in 2012 – but also initiate planning for Landsat 9 and 10.

While “home” undoubtedly is her district in Tucson, AZ, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords went home today from TIRR Memorial Hermann Hospital to her husband Mark Kelly’s home in League City, TX. Kelly is a NASA astronaut. League City is close to NASA’s Johnson Space Center where astronauts train.

Giffords will continue to go to TIRR every day for outpatient therapy. The hospital released a statement saying that “her cognitive abilities and physical strength have improved to the poiint where she no longer needs to remain a patient in the hospital.”

In an Arizona Republic story republished on the congresswoman’s website, her spokesman, CJ Karamargin, is quoted as saying that she is “elated.” The newspaper also quotes Kelly as saying that his wife loves to be outside and now, while she will still go to TIRR daily, “when she finishes rehab, she will be with her family.”

Seven Republican House members sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden yesterday criticizing the agency for not complying with the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.

“We … strongly request that you stop studying and re-studying NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) … and report to Congress on NASA’s final plan for SLS,” they wrote. Signing the letter were Representatives Pete Olson (R-TX), John Culberson (R-TX), Rob Bishop(R-UT), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Bill Posey (R-FL), and Sandy Adams (R-FL).

Members of both parties have complained over the past several months that NASA is moving too slowly on choosing a design for the congressionally-mandated SLS. The authorization act was a compromise between the Obama Administration’s preference for relying on the commercial sector to develop a new crew transportation system for access to low Earth orbit (LEO) and congressional determination to have the government build a larger (“heavy lift”) vehicle that enables human exploration beyond LEO. The law directs NASA to do both and to expeditiously move out on building the heavy lift vehicle — the SLS. Congress required NASA to submit a report on its plans within 90 days of the law’s enactment, but the report that was submitted in January was only an interim report. Congress has been waiting for the final report and is becoming impatient. Four key Senators — two Democrats and two Republicans — wrote their own letter to Bolden last month.

The seven House members left no doubt about their views on NASA’s delay. The current situation is “irresponsible, objectionable, and incompliant with the law,” they wrote.

With construction of the International Space Station (ISS) complete, the time has come to utilize it as the backbone of a new space economy in low Earth orbit (LEO). That was the key message from Mark Uhran, NASA’s assistant associate administrator for ISS, at a Space Transportation Association luncheon today.

Calling the ISS a “Herculean achievement” so far, Uhran said “the best is yet to come, provided we don’t let opportunity slip through our fingers.”

The necessary next step, he said, is for the government and space industry to stimulate non-aerospace non-governmental demand to make use of the ISS, a piece of infrastructure that has cost U.S. taxpayers alone close to $100 billion. The U.S. cost of ISS to date is $60 billion, and another $20-30 billion will be spent on operations in the next decade, Uhran said. He did not provide an estimate of how much it has cost the other partners in the program: Russia, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency.

“I’ve chosen my words carefully,” he stressed: “Note that the action verb is to stimulate, not to invest. The government can’t afford to invest another $100 billion.”

NASA and the space industry need to “actively stimulate non-government demand by an aggressive and strategically structured plan of action to engage non-aerospace scientific and industrial R&D organizations that are presently unaware of the benefits to be gained through space-based R&D programs,” he continued. R&D is the underpinning of long-term economic growth, according to Uhran, and ISS is “primed” for its R&D role.

NASA will announce later this summer the winner of its competition for a non-profit entity to fill the role of stimulating demand and serving as the nexus between NASA and the non-governmental users. Uhran warned, however, that there is one other “trap door” to be avoided – tensions between different user communities. Scientists, engineers and industrialists are all welcome. “No single interest group should be allowed to politically capture exclusive control of the ISS R&D agenda,” he cautioned.

Selection of the non-profit entity had been expected on May 31, and that date is still displayed on the ISS National Laboratory website as the selection date. Uhran said that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requirement was that it be completed by the end of FY 2011 (September 30, 2011), and while he called the selection “imminent,” he added that it would be made “later this summer upon successful completion of negotiations.”