Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-134) will not launch before next Sunday, May 8, and perhaps later, according to NASA.

The launch was scrubbed on Friday because of a problem with one of the three Auxiiary Power Units (APUs). The APUs provide hydraulic power to steer the shuttle during launch and reentry. NASA discovered that a heater in APU-1 that prevents its fuel from freezing while in space failed because of a bad power circuit in a switchbox located in the orbiter’s aft compartment. NASA said today that it is developing a schedule to remove and replace the swtichbox and retest the unit. An official launch date will not be announced for a few days. May 8 is the earliest that it can launch. The crew has returned to Houston.

The air of excitement surrounding the final launch of Endeavour (STS-134), scheduled for 3:47 pm EDT this afternoon, is at almost fever pitch with two VIPs planning to be in attendance. President Obama will fly to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) after he visits tornado-ravaged Alabama, and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), wife of Endeavour commander Mark Kelly, has flown to KSC from her rehabilitation hospital in Houston.

Video from a distance of Giffords climbing the stairs of a NASA aircraft to fly to Florida was widely shown Wednesday and yesterday. It was the first time the public had any view at all of the Congresswoman since she was shot in the head on January 8 during an assassination attempt.

Whether it is the President’s attendance or Rep. Giffords’s, or both, there is much more media attention to this launch than usual. Even Politico is covering it! Hopefully it will launch as scheduled; the weather forecast is 70 percent go.

If nothing else, the public finally seems to be getting the message that this is the next to last shuttle flight.

UPDATE: NASA now says Monday is the earliest it can launch, a 72 hour delay.

ORIGINAL STORY:

NASA scrubbed the STS-134 (Endeavour) launch scheduled for this afternoon because of a problem with Auxiliary Power Unit 1 heaters. The agency said it will be at least 48 hours before they can try again. Visit NASA’s shuttle website for more information.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has formally agreed to extending International Space Station (ISS) operations through at least 2020. Russia and Japan already had agreed to the extension in response to President Obama’s decision last year to keep the facility operating past 2015, the end date established by the George W. Bush Administration.

The ISS partnership includes the United States, Russia, ESA, Japan and Canada. President Obama’s decision thus was only the first step in getting agreement from the partnership as a whole. The Canadian Space Agency is still “working with its government to reach consensus” about continuing the ISS, according to NASA’s press release.

President Bush had planned to terminate ISS operations in 2015 in order to focus the U.S. human spaceflight program on returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That program, Constellation, is being terminated by the Obama Administration, which views ISS as the future of the U.S. human spaceflight program for the rest of this decade at least. President Obama announced a goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, not to the Moon, last year.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will launch in 2018 only if NASA receives more funding for the program than the flat budget assumed in the President’s FY2012 budget request according to an agency official.

JWST is usually described as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, although it will study the universe in a different part of the spectrum (infrared instead of visible) and from a very different location (the L2 Lagrange point instead of Earth orbit).

NASA’s Rick Howard told the NASA Advisory Council’s Science Committee on April 21 that the agency is still looking at how best to “rebaseline” the program to move forward. That effort will be completed in the coming weeks. Howard was designated as JWST Program Director last fall after an independent review faulted the program’s “budgeting and program management, not technical performance” as the cause of substantial cost increases. That report said the earliest launch date was 2015 if certain financial resources — $500 million for each of FY2011 and FY2012 — were made available. Howard is doing a more detailed assessment and looking more closely at what funds are likely to be provided.

Howard stressed that he is still gathering data to feed into the agency’s Joint Confidence Level (JCL) independent cost estimating process before any decisions are made. The last three years of the program preparing for launch are “incompressible,” he said. If a launch date prior to 2018 is desired, the schedule could be moved forward only if more money is provided in the immediate future (FY2012 or FY2013). Absent such increases the agency is looking at 2018 as the earliest launch date, which is five years later than the original plan.

Achieving the 2018 date also requires more funds in the longer term than what is in NASA’s FY2012 projection. That “runout” shows the program flat funded at $375 million per year for the next five years. Howard said if that really turned out to be the budget for the program, launch would be pushed out into the 2020s.

Howard said funding adjustments would have to be discussed within the agency and with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Several committee members emphasized that programs like JWST cannot be accomplished with flat budgets and said they hoped OMB and OSTP realize that.

NASA plans to spend $471 million on JWST in this fiscal year (FY2011) and Howard insisted the amount for FY2011 would not be lower than that. As an agency, NASA received $561 million less than the $19 billion it requested for FY2011. The agency is developing an operating plan to show how to plans to spend the approximately $18.5 billion that Congress provided. Howard clearly believes that JWST will not be a place where cuts are made to accommodate the lower appropriation.

Meanwhile, JWST hardware is being delivered to NASA. One issue is how to store everything for this unexpectedly lengthy period of time and deal with obsolescence and workforce issues. Howard asked rhetorically how many of the people working on the program would want to stay with it now that the launch date is so many years later than planned.

Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the Senate Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee that funds NASA, is a long time cheerleader for NASA and its space and earth science programs, many of which are managed at Goddard Space Flight Center in her State. She has been an ardent advocate for JWST, but her displeasure at the new cost overruns that emerged last year was made clear when she demanded the independent review that led to the current replanning effort (the “Casani report,” after its chair, John Casani).

At an April 11, 2011 hearing, she expressed her continued support for the telescope, but exasperation at the overruns, pointedly asking NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden what he was doing to make the program succeed. Bolden replied that “no one was more disappointed and angry” than he was when NASA “got to the bottom of the situation.” He said he had made management changes at the agency and was working with the prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, but declined to discuss what the company is doing.

Bolden was the first to reveal, at the hearing, that the agency is currently looking at a 2018 launch date. Mikulski asked whether NASA was going to request the extra $500 million for FY2011 and FY2012 identified in the Casani report, but Bolden said he could not “responsibly” make such a proposal, which is why 2018 is NASA’s current target. He said the agency does not need more money in FY2011 to meet a 2018 launch date, and is still looking at how much would be needed in 2012. He told the Senator he hoped to have an answer soon. Mikulski said she was all for being “frugal,” but not “foolish. ” She does not want to scrimp now and end up paying much more in the future. “If we don’t spend the money now, when will we spend it, and will it cost more?” she asked. NASA will answer those questions when its review is completed.

UPDATES: The ASAP meeting scheduled for Friday has been postponed until May 24. The NASA media teleconference with the CCDev2 winners on Thursday, April 28, has been added.

The following events may be of interest in the week ahead. For more information, check our calendar on the right menu or click the links below. All times are local. The House and Senate remain in recess this week for the spring break.

Monday, April 25

• NRC Workshop on Effects of Solar Variability on the Earth’s Climate, Keck Center, 500 5th Street, NW, Washington DC, open to the public 9:30 am – 1:00 pm

Tuesday, April 26

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) IT Committee, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MD, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm
• NAC Exploration Committee, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, 1:00 – 6:00 PM

Tuesday-Wednesday, April 26-27

• MIT “Earth, Air, Ocean and Space: The Future of Exploration” symposium, Cambridge, MA
• NASA/NASM History of Spaceflight Symposium: 1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC

Tuesday-Thursday, April 26-28

• NRC Panel on Human Health and Surface Exploration of the Technology Roadmaps Committee, Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston TX

Wednesday, April 27

• NAC Commercial Space Committee, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, 2:00-3:30 pm

Wednesday-Friday, April 27-29

• NRC Committee on Assessment of NASA’s Earth Science Programs. Open sessions only on April 28. Keck Center, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington DC

Thursday, April 28

• NASA Media Teleconference with CCDev2 winners, 11:00 am EDT (watch on NASA TV)

Thursday-Friday, April 28-29

• NAC Technology and Innovation Committee, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC,
  • Thursday, 8:30 am – 4:00 pm
  • Friday, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, April 29

• NAC Education & Public Outreach Committee, St. Louis, MO, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm in different locations during the day
• NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Council, Kennedy Space Center, FL, 11:00 am – 1:00 PM. THIS MEETING HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL MAY 24 BECAUSE OF THE STS-134 LAUNCH.
• STS-134 launch, 3:47 pm EDT

As the House prepared to recess for its spring break, three bills were introduced that would affect NASA. Two address the retirement homes for the space shuttles and one would direct NASA to focus on returning astronauts to the Moon.

The shuttle retirement home issue arose after NASA Administrator Bolden decided to send the four orbiters to Kennedy Space Center (Atlantis), New York City (Enterprise), Washington, DC (Discovery) and Los Angeles (Endeavour). Folks in Texas and Ohio felt slighted. Some of the Ohio congressional delegation have called for a GAO investigation. Those who want Houston to be one of the locations have taken a different approach — legislation.

H.R. 1590, introduced by Rep. Shiela Jackson Lee (D-TX) and four co-sponsors would require that space shuttle Discovery be placed on display at Space Center Houston for 15 years and then “returned” to Washington, DC. NASA’s decision was to send Discovery to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center outside of Washington, and since the legislation says that it would be “returned” to Washington it seems to assume that it would be in Washington first. How long it would be in Washington before being sent to Houston is not addressed in the legislation, nor is the money needed to transport it from one place to the other. NASA uses a specially converted 747 to ferry the shuttles around the country and presumably it would have to remain in service to accomplish the goal of this legislation.

H.R. 1536, introduced by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), would send Atlantis to Florida and Discovery to Washington, DC as NASA wants, but Enterprise would go to Los Angeles instead of New York. Endeavour, which NASA plans to send to Los Angeles, would go to Houston instead. New York would lose out. One complaint has been that three of the orbiters would be on the East Coast and none in the center of the country.

Separately, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) introduced H.R. 1641, the Reasserting American Leadership in Space Act or the REAL Act. It directs NASA to plan to return astronauts to the Moon by 2022 and “develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, in order to promote exploration, commerce, science, and United States preeminence in space as a stepping stone for the future exploration of Mars and other destinations.” The bill does not include any funding, but states that NASA’s budget requests and expenditures should be “consistent with achieving this goal.”