For the foreseeable future, NASA plans to send just four to six astronauts — American and international — to the space station each year, paying Russia up to $56 million per seat.
Instead of waiting, Reisman joined a steady flow of astronauts drifting away from NASA like so many untethered spacewalkers.
The agency’s vaunted astronaut corps, trained to withstand high acceleration, dangerous spacewalks, isolation and countless technical hiccups, now confronts a challenge with no handy checklist: the unknown.
“A lot of astronauts have to make a decision. Do they want to wait five, six, seven years?” said Thomas D. Jones, a Baltimore native who flew four shuttle missions before leaving NASA in 2001.
At that time, the agency employed 150 astronauts, the largest space-going workforce in its history. By October 2009, that number had fallen to 92. Now it stands at 61, with two retirements imminent — including that of Mark Kelly, the commander of a recent shuttle mission and the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the wounded Arizona congresswoman — and “a few more departures” likely later this year, said Peggy Whitson, chief astronaut at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“This is a time of transition, and it’s stressful for everyone at NASA,” said Reisman. In May, the Ph.D. mechanical engineer landed at SpaceX, the Hawthorne, Calif., start-up that has a $1.6 billion NASA contract to resupply the space station. There he joins another former astronaut, Kenneth Bowersox, and together the pair are upgrading the company’s Dragon space capsule to one day hoist astronauts to the space station.
That goal will be aided by another former astronaut, Pamela Melroy, who left NASA in 2009. In June, Melroy joined the Federal Aviation Administration, where she will work closely with SpaceX and other companies to develop safety regulations for the fledging commercial space industry.
Melroy piloted two shuttle missions and commanded a third. But the tedium of training for an uncertain future drove her to seek new challenges. “I didn’t want to get into a position where I was jockeying politically to get onto one of last few [shuttle] flights,” she said.
No one knows when astronauts will fly the Dragon or any other U.S.-built spacecraft. President Obama and Congress have directed NASA to develop a capsule — originally known as Orion and now called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle — for future flights to asteroids or beyond. In its 2011 spending plan, NASA says it will pour $1.2 billion into the new craft. But the Apollo-like capsule has no hard timeline for completion. No mission has been selected.
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