PARIS: Mike Suffredini, manager of NASA’s International Space Station program, is stepping down after 10 years overseeing the lab’s final assembly and transition to post-shuttle operations, the agency said Wednesday. Kirk Shireman, deputy director of the Johnson Space Center and Suffredini’s former deputy, will take over as program manager.
Suffredini, whose matter-of-fact, detailed explanations of complex technical issues made him a favorite of space reporters, was responsible for getting the hugely-expensive space station completed in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster.
Along with overseeing a series of complex shuttle assembly missions, he also worked with the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos to secure seats on Soyuz spacecraft to ensure U.S. and partner astronauts could reach the station after the shuttle’s retirement in 2011.
He also helped implement U.S. commercial cargo flights to the lab complex and was a proponent of NASA’s push to build U.S. commercial crew ferry ships to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for transportation to and from the space station.
In an unrelated development, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden sent a letter to Congress Wednesday saying that past and projected budget cuts in the commercial crew program had forced the agency to extend its contract with Roscosmos for an additional six seats in 2018 and 2019 at a cost of some $490 million, or nearly $82 million a seat.
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