Sat, Oct 04, 2008
Boeing To Help Keep Station Going Through September 2010
NASA has awarded a two-year, $650 million contract extension to
The Boeing Co. to continue engineering support of the International
Space Station to September 30, 2010.
The action extends the NAS15-10000 US On-Orbit Segment (USOS)
Acceptance and Vehicle Sustaining Engineering Contract, awarded in
January 1995. Work under the contract extension will include
completion of delivery and on-orbit acceptance of the US segment of
the station, sustaining engineering of station hardware and
software, support of US hardware and software provided to
international partners and participants in the station program, and
end-to-end subsystem management for the majority of station
systems.
The work will be performed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in
Houston, Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, AL., and at other domestic and international
locations.
Though two-year contract extensions are common among US
aerospace and defense procurement programs, the exact timing of
this contract's deadline is notable in that September 30, 2010 also
marks the end of the space shuttle program... leaving NASA with no
homegrown means of sending US astronauts to the station, until its
Orion spacecraft is ready for manned flight sometime in 2015.
For the moment, NASA plans to acquire seats onboard Russian
Soyuz capsules for US astronauts... a stopgap measure that grows
less attractive by the day, as Russia takes aggressive steps to
reassert itself as a global superpower. A number of private
companies are also working to develop their own space capsules,
though none have even flown a test mission as of yet.
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