As NASA retires its space shuttle fleet in 2010, 900 manufacturing jobs over the next five months will also go away. Reports indicate that the first 160 layoff notices go out on Friday mainly to contractors who produce the space shuttle fuel tanks outside New Orleans and the shuttle solid rocket boosters in Utah. The prime contractors for those components are Lockheed Martin Corp. and ATK Thiokol.

Announcements by managers indicate a May 11 launch date for shuttle Atlantis' 11-day mission to Hubble. Liftoff is set for 2:01 p.m. EDT (1801 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The three-ship shuttle fleet is due to be retired after eight more flights to finish building and equipping the International Space Station and a final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA has made four previous servicing calls to Hubble to repair equipment and install new science instruments. The shuttle is the only vehicle that is diverse in that it can service orbiting satellites, such as the Hubble telescope, as well as handle large construction such as the assembly of the space station.

Five spacewalks will be conducted on the final Hubble visit in which a new camera will be installed, and two instruments no longer working will be repaired. NASA's goal is that this mission will leave Hubble in good enough shape to maintain it until at least 2014 when an more sophisticated replacement telescope is put into orbit.

Image right: Astronauts Andrew Feustel (bottom), John Grunsfeld (center left), Mike Massimino and Michael Good (center, right), all STS-125 mission specialists, work with a Hubble Space Telescope mock-up during a spacewalk training session in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory near NASA's Johnson Space Center. Image credit: NASA

NASA plans to replace the shuttles with Apollo-style capsules that will travel to the space station as well as be able to fly astronauts to the moon's surface.

Information was also released indicating that in order to keep the new spaceships, named Orion, on track for a 2015 launch, NASA concluded they would produce only one version of the capsule with room for four astronauts, rather than the six-seater version that had been planned for flights to the station. Money for developing Orion and its launcher, called Ares, is coming from funds that previously went toward shuttle operations and station construction.

The observatory, launched in 1990, has been critical in assisting scientists in understanding the universe as well as bringing information to the public about astronomy.