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Let Private Firms Run Space Taxis, Panel Told

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - The U.S. government should leave the business of launching cargo and people into Earth orbit to private commercial space transporters, members of a presidential panel said on Wednesday.

A subcommittee of the Human Space Flight Review panel said turning over transport services to the International Space Station to private firms would allow the U.S. space agency NASA to focus on new challenges, such as extending human presence beyond low-Earth orbit.

The International Space Station, a $100 billion project involving 16 nations, orbits about 225 miles above the planet.

"My God, great NASA has been to the moon and we are sort of thinking that it is a big challenge for us to continue going to (low-Earth orbit)? Let's turn it over to newcomers," Bohdan "Bo" Bejmuk, a former Boeing Co executive, told panel members.

"I think you will find out there are a lot of people who will rise and compete," Bejmuk told the meeting broadcast by NASA. "Some of them will fail, some of them will succeed, but you will have essentially created a new industry."

NASA currently spends about half of its budget -- $18 billion in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009 -- on human space programs.

Its future plans include completing construction of the space station with seven final shuttle missions, retiring the shuttle fleet in 2010 and developing new spacecraft that can travel to the space station, the moon and other destinations.

NASA has provided seed funds for privately-funded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), and Orbital Sciences Corp, to develop commercial spaceships to haul cargo to the space station.

SpaceX, founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, also has a contract option to upgrade its capsule with an escape system and other equipment needed for passenger service.

The government's own new Orion spaceship is scheduled to debut in 2015.

A review conducted for the panel by The Aerospace Corp. shows an additional two-year delay is likely based on current budget plans and the program's technical status.

The human space flight review panel, headed by former Lockheed Martin chief Norm Augustine, is scheduled to issue its report by August 31.

NASA meanwhile prepared on Wednesday for the homecoming of the shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew.

The astronauts used the ship's robot arm to reinspect Endeavour's heat shield to make sure it was intact for Friday's descent through the atmosphere and landing.

Touchdown is scheduled for 10:48 a.m. EDT (1448 GMT) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Ontario government should halt all logging and road building in endangered woodland caribou habitat, as six out of nine known populations below the 51st parallel are at risk of collapsing, environmentalists warn.

A report released today by the Wildlands League reveals the formerly pristine habitats of six caribou populations have already been disturbed by logging and wildfires to the point where they likely will no longer sustain the extremely sensitive species.

A seventh caribou range is close to the established threshold beyond which scientists say caribou become too exposed to predators and no longer reproduce sufficiently to maintain their numbers.

"We've always suspected trouble. We didn't realize it was this bad," says Anna Baggio, director of conservation with the Wildlands League, the Ontario branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

"We're already in emergency mode for this species," says her colleague, Trevor Hesselink, who wrote the report. "The government has to stop exacerbating the situation."

Woodland caribou are among the first species to be actively protected under Ontario's new Endangered Species Act. But the government is still developing its conservation plan and has not yet introduced habitat legislation for it that would lay out specifically where development could and could not occur. In the meantime, the province continues to issue logging permits.

Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield says all logging companies already have to submit plans that include caribou management. Her staff has assembled a panel of caribou scientists to develop a conservation strategy for the species.

"If there is new information out there, we are more than open to it," she said yesterday. "But I feel very confident we will have a very good strategy in place and very good regulation in place, based on good science, more research and the best advice in the world."

The caribou are considered an indicator species, reflecting the health of the boreal forest. They thrive only in untouched forest, roaming vast distances in solitude and feeding on lichen. They are extremely sensitive to development, as roads invariably bring predators, such as wolves. Once roaming as far south as Algonquin Park, their numbers have been cut in half over the past century.

"The more disturbances in an area, whether by fire or by humans, the less likely they persist," says Jim Schaefer, a professor of biology at Trent University who has studied the caribou for 25 years.

Schaefer was part of a science advisory group that produced the first large-scale national study on woodland caribou habitat for Environment Canada last year. They determined that if more than about a third of a caribou population's range is disturbed , the population will decline.