Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: REDUNDANT SPACEMEN

by Hazed

NASA's plans for future space missions are likely to be cut back severely if Congress votes through President Obama's plans to axe the Constellation program. This was the planned manned spaceflight successor to the space shuttle.

So that'll leave very little for astronauts to do, because apart from helping to crew the ISS, the main humans-in-space activities will be gone. "We will be going from three large programs to one in a six-month span," said the chief of the Johnson Space Center - home to the astronaut corp. "That is a big impact. I'm very anxious about how we maintain our core competencies, human space flight, space operations and astronaut training."

NASA currently has 88 active-status astronauts. So what are they going to do? And of course, apart from the spacemen there are another 7,000 Earthbound jobs at the center associated with the shuttle and Constellation programs. There are bound to be redundancies for them, too.

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