Breaking: House adds $$$ for extra Shuttle flight… FOR SCIENCE

This is amazing news: The House just approved a budget for NASA next year that includes money for an extra Shuttle flight. Now, are you sitting down? The flight is to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a science experiment, to the space station! Whoa. The AMS was built with money from the DoE and a bunch of other countries, and NASA promised to loft it into orbit before the Shuttle program was vastly scaled back. NASA has balked at launching it because of the cost of an extra flight and the very tight schedule for the Shuttle to finish building the station. The funny thing is, once the space station is finished it's not good for much. But with the AMS on it it'll be doing loads of cool science. Not surprisingly, the Bush Administration is against the extra flight -- maybe he's just used to knee-jerking against anything this ...