"This has been something that has been troubling us for some time," Joel Montalbano, the deputy space station program manager, said at a news conference after the spacewalk.
The official, John Shannon, deputy space shuttle program manager, said experts at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama were to test the electrical connector, taken from the Atlantis's external fuel tank, next week to confirm that it was the source of the problem.
"They knew that the crew was absolutely dedicated to the mission that they were performing," said Readdy, a former shuttle commander who is now NASA's deputy administrator for space flight.
After intense lobbying of Homer Newell, NASA's deputy director of space flight programs, Rossi secured a flight opportunity on Explorer 10, "Goddard's first home-grown satellite".
Captain Shepherd, who was deputy manager for the space station program from 1993 to 1996, has spent 440 hours in space on three shuttle flights.
Shannan Moynihan, MD, MPH is the Deputy Branch Chief of Space and Occupational Medicine at NASA's Johnson Space Center, as well as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the center.
The space station deputy manager, Robert Cabana, said he considered the project more difficult than NASA's quest for the moon in the 1960's.
"Direct subsidies would be very, very difficult under the current political situtation," said Maskazu Yoshida, the deputy director of the space division of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
Russia is ready to help China build a national space station, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov told the Itar-Tass news agency today before returning from a trip to Beijing.
"There is still going to be a possibility that a golden BB could get us," N. Wayne Hale Jr., the deputy director of the space shuttle program, told reporters in briefings this month.
In a country with persistent economic problems, a semiofficial news agency quoted the deputy head of the space agency as saying the $15 billion to $20 billion cost was too high.
