November 21 News Items

2nd Night of False Alarms on Space Station (Source: Discovery)
Depressurization and smoke alarms woke the shuttle and station crews for a second consecutive night on Friday. Flight controllers quickly determined they were false alarms, but the station's ventilation system automatically shut down, prompting NASA to cancel spacewalk preparations inside a low-pressure chamber on the station. Astronauts Michael Foreman and Randy Bresnik were camping out in the station's Quest airlock to purge their bodies from nitrogen in advance of Saturday's spacewalk, a planned 6.5-hour outing to install antennas and a cargo mount to the outside of the station. (11/21)

Constellation Claims Half of NASA Stimulus Funds To Date (Source: Space News)
With less than a year remaining to spend $1 billion in stimulus money that the U.S. Congress gave NASA in February as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the space agency has spent roughly $570 million, with nearly half of those dollars going toward its embattled Constellation program. So far, some $270 million in ARRA funding has gone to Constellation, a 5-year-old effort to build new spacecraft and rockets optimized for sending astronauts to the Moon. The administration of President Barack Obama is reconsidering those plans and looking at scenarios that would entail the cancellation of projects currently receiving stimulus funds, including the Ares 1 rocket. (11/21)