Longer Life for the Space Station Is Advised

Members of the government panel reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight program said Tuesday that the life of the International Space Station should be extended past its planned demise in 2016.

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Times Topics: International Space Station

After the shuttle Endeavour, which undocked from the space station Tuesday afternoon, returns to Earth, NASA has seven flights left on its schedule before the shuttle fleet is to be retired in September 2010. At that point the space station, under construction since 1998, would finally be complete, but current plans call for operating it only through 2015 before it is deliberately disposed of in the ocean the following year.

Part of the Obama administration’s charge to the 10-member review panel, which made its recommendation Tuesday at a public hearing in Houston, was to look at extending the station’s life. But the panel is also to consider how NASA is to push beyond low-Earth orbit in the coming years and fit the entire program within tight financial constraints.

The meeting was the second held by the panel, which is led by Norman R. Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin. At the first meeting, last month in Washington, the members listened to an array of information and opinions from others. On Tuesday, they began debating among themselves what options they will offer to the administration at the end of next month.

“We think all the options going forward should continue I.S.S. extension in some form,” said Sally K. Ride, a former NASA astronaut who was the first American woman in space.

Dr. Ride, who led a subcommittee looking at the space station, said the schedule for the remaining seven shuttle flights had little cushion left and was likely to slip into 2011, at an additional cost of $1.5 billion.

The shuttles can carry a far greater load into orbit than any other rockets now in use, and can also bring heavy items back to the ground. “We’re putting I.S.S. in a very fragile situation the moment we retire shuttle,” Dr. Ride said.

With one extra external fuel tank available, one more shuttle flight could be flown in 2012, at a cost of $2.7 billion, she said.

Another possibility would be to fly one or two shuttle missions through 2014, Dr. Ride said, but reviving the manufacturing lines used for the shuttle would make sense only if NASA canceled its plans for its next-generation rockets and switched to a shuttle-derived design.

Another member of the panel, Edward F. Crawley, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cautioned that continuing present programs would delay plans for returning to the Moon or aiming for Mars.

“This is NASA’s conundrum at the highest level,” Dr. Crawley said, “which is that the agency really doesn’t in its current budgetary structure have the resources to continue a world-class, world-leading space program and also simultaneously develop the next step.”

The panel members will continue their discussions at two more public meetings this week, in Huntsville, Ala., on Wednesday in Cocoa Beach, Fla., on Thursday. link...

Musharraf shuns Pakistan court hearing on misrule

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistan Supreme Court hearing into allegations of misrule by former president Pervez Musharraf resumed on Wednesday, without any lawyers present to defend the ex-army chief, who left for London two months ago.

Last week, a 14-member bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry ordered Musharraf to answer charges that he had violated the constitution by ousting the judiciary and imposing emergency rule in November, 2007 in a desperate move to extend his rule.

Fighting a Taliban insurgency in the northwest, dire economic challenges and doubts about its own standards of governance, Pakistan's fragile civilian government can ill-afford the distraction of raking over the past, according to critics.

Others say leaders should be held accountable if democratic institutions are to grow, and future generals should be made to think twice before launching coups against civilian governments.

The army, which stepped back from politics after Musharraf's ouster, would be loathe to be dragged into the controversy, but generals, having backed Musharraf's actions in 2007, would not want to see their old chief humiliated, according to analysts.

Opening proceedings on Wednesday, Chaudhry received no response when asked who was present to represent Musharraf.

"We haven't received any notice so far and once we get it then we will decide whether to appear before the court or not," Saif Ali Khan, a member of Musharraf's legal team, told Reuters by telephone from London.

Musharraf, who came to power in a military coup in 1999, had previously voiced both his intention to defend himself and his expectation of a fair hearing from a court headed by the judge who became his nemesis. link...

Car Bomb Wounds Dozens in Northern Spain

MADRID — A powerful car bomb that authorities blamed on the violent Basque separatist group ETA exploded early Wednesday outside a police barracks in the northern Spanish city of Burgos, injuring dozens of policemen and their family members, a police spokeswoman said.

The was no warning call ahead of the explosion, which occurred just before 4 a.m. as some 90 police and their families slept in the barracks, according to the spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with police rules.

The blast injured 46 people, including six children, none of them seriously, she said. It sent the car flying into the air and shattered windows in nearby houses.

Television images showed charred wreckage from the car presumed to have caused the blast and gaping holes across the façade of the tall brick building, where windows had been blown out. One neighbor, who was interviewed by Spanish National Television, said she was thrown from her bed by the blast.

ETA, which is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department and the European Union, has killed more than 825 people during its decades-old violent campaign for an independent Basque homeland.

The group, which frequently targets the police, was blamed for a car bomb that killed a policeman last month as he got into his vehicle just outside the Basque city of Bilbao.

A car bomb near a police barracks in Legutiano, in the northern Basque region, in June last year killed a policeman who was on guard outside. Members of the civil guard, which is a rural police force, often live in barracks.

ETA declared what it called a permanent cease-fire in 2006, but reverted to violence within months after peace talks with the Spanish government went nowhere. link...

Terror allegations against NC man shock neighbors

RALEIGH, N.C. — A North Carolina man described as family-oriented and quick to help neighbors was recruiting and training aspiring terrorists to wage jihad, federal authorities say, accusations that family and neighbors find hard to believe.

Daniel Boyd, 39, spent three years traveling to the Middle East, secretly buying guns, and leading a group of men planning to kidnap, kill and maim people abroad, according to charges in an indictment released Monday. Neighbors of the family who live in an unassuming lakeside home in a rural area south of Raleigh are having a hard time reconciling the man they know with what prosecutors are alleging.

"If he's a terrorist, he's the nicest terrorist I ever met in my life. I don't think he is," said Charles Casale, 46, a neighbor in Willow Spring who recently got pointers on planting vegetables from the Boyd, who worked as a drywall contractor, and his wife.

Boyd was arrested along with six others — including two sons — accused of being the ringleader of the group involved in three years of nefarious international travel, gun buys and military-style training trips. Authorities claim the group, including an eighth suspect believed to be in Pakistan, were gearing up for a "violent jihad," though prosecutors haven't detailed any specific targets or timeframe. If convicted, the men could face life in prison.

At least one of Boyd's trips abroad caught the attention of Israeli authorities: Boyd's wife told a Raleigh newspaper that he was denied entry to the country in 2007 and detained for two days.

Prosecutors said Boyd received terrorist training in Pakistan and brought the teachings back to North Carolina, recruiting followers willing to die as martyrs waging jihad — the Arabic word for holy war.

Boyd's wife, Sabrina, urged the public not to rush to judgment. Their sons Zakariya, 20, and Dylan, 22, were also named in the indictment. Another son, Luqman, died two years ago in a car accident.

"We have the right to justice, and we believe that justice will prevail," she said in a statement. "We are decent people who care about other human beings."

In an interview with the News & Observer of Raleigh, Boyd said her husband and sons' trips abroad were pilgrimages, specifically denying prosecutors' allegation that Daniel Boyd took a son to Gaza in 2006 to meet with others bent on violence. She told the newspaper on Tuesday that her husband took another son named Noah, who's not named in the indictment, to see Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem that year.

"The point of a pilgrimage is to see the Al-Aksa mosque, the Dome of the Rock, to hear the call to prayer and to make a prayer," she said.

In 2007, Daniel and Zakariya Boyd were denied entry to Israel at the airport in Tel Aviv, detained for two days, then flown to France, she said. The newspaper didn't say whether Israeli authorities gave the men a reason for denying them entry.

Prosecutors said that this year Boyd, frustrated by Raleigh-area mosques that he saw as too moderate, started breaking away to hold prayers in his home. In the last two months, he took two group members to private property in north-central North Carolina to practice military tactics and use weapons.

"It's clear from the indictment that the overt acts in the conspiracy were escalating," U.S. Attorney George E.B. Holding said.

Boyd's wife told the newspaper she knew nothing about the training site cited by prosecutors, and she said the family had firearms because they enjoyed hunting and shooting.

Boyd's neighbors also defended him.

A friend and neighbor, 20-year-old Jeremy Kuhn, said the family seemed closer and more loving than any of the other nearby households.

"If it turns out they were terrorists, I will be the most shocked person in the world," he said. "I think they have seven innocent people sitting in jail waiting to have their lives ruined."

The other four men arrested range in age from 21 to 33. Only one is not a U.S. citizen, but he is a legal resident.

An attorney who met with one of the defendants, Ziyad Yaghi, 21, said Yaghi was disappointed.

"Our concern is that people are rushing to a judgment and there's no evidence that anyone's been shown," attorney Robert Nunley said.

Public defenders assigned to Boyd did not return messages seeking comment, and there were no attorneys for the other men listed in court records. They are expected to appear in court Thursday for a detention hearing, facing charges of providing material support to terrorism; conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons abroad, and firearms counts.

Authorities believe the eighth suspect is in Pakistan, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of . A second law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the suspect was Jude Kenan Mohammad, 20. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the investigation.

Authorities believe Boyd's roots in terrorism run deep. When he was in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 through 1992, he had military-style training in terrorist camps and fought the Soviets, who were ending their occupation of Afghanistan, according to the indictment.

In 1991, Boyd and his brother were convicted of bank robbery in Pakistan. They were also accused of carrying identification showing they belonged to the radical Afghan guerrilla group, Hezb-e-Islami, or Party of Islam. Each was sentenced to have a foot and a hand cut off for the robbery, but the decision was overturned.

The indictment said some of the defendants took trips to Jordan, Israel and Pakistan to engage in jihad, but only discussed the results of one of those trips. After traveling to Israel, Boyd and his two sons returned to the United States in July 2007 "having failed in their attempt," according to the documents.

Associated Press writers Devlin Barrett in Washington; Adam Goldman in New York and Alysia Patterson in Willow Spring contributed to this report. link...