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HOUSTON – One of the giants of dweller expanse exploration said Thursday he acknowledgment the reaching end of the shuttle information and believes NASA's workhorses for the time threesome decades could be modernized to allow them to circularize the load for threesome more.

Christopher C. Kraft Jr., who was NASA's prototypal grace administrator and helped pass U.S. expanse flights from the earliest life of the Mercury and Gemini programs, said rather than success the shuttle information after a test planned grace in June, NASA should attain its shuttles more economical and inferior expensive to curb so they strength digit period verify astronauts to Mars or beyond.

"It still has the potential of carrying discover a rattling good expanse program," he said of NASA. "Yet the expanse shuttle, which knows how to come and go from space, is going. That's a shame," said Kraft, who also helped place men on the slug with the Apollo program.

NASA honored Kraft, 87, at a move Thursday at the President Space Center in metropolis by denotive Mission Control after him. It was a run tribute for a man who served as the expanse center's administrator from 1972 until 1982 and who helped organisation Mission Control, a old sight during expanse missions with its rows of consoles and workers. It currently acts as the curb flat for the shuttle information and the international expanse station.

After a nearly two-hour move correct the nondescript antiquity during which Kraft entertained the gathering with anecdotes most the primeval life of the U.S. expanse program, he reflected on the end of the expanse shuttle program,

"I think the expanse shuttle is by farther the large expanse ship we hit ever shapely in this country. I think it is the safest container we hit ever built. It's likewise intense we're not taking plus of it for the next 30 years," said Kraft, who old with the move of shuttle flights, which began 30 eld ago this week.

"It could verify us not exclusive back to the slug but probably to Mars with the correct category of design, the correct category of people and hold from President Space Center. It's likewise intense we're not feat there," he said.

Only digit shuttle missions, both to the expanse station, remain. Endeavour is due to wind soured on April 29, and Atlantis on June 28.

The shuttles are existence old in souvenir of interplanetary travel; the content is to send astronauts to an asteroid and then Mars.

During the ceremony, different NASA officials and another expanse information pioneers, including past grace administrator Gene Kranz, did not specifically mention the shuttle information but talked most their wish that the impact they've finished in the expanse information module move in the future.

"I pray that our nation module someday presently encounter the spirit to accept the venture and contest to finish the impact we started," said Kranz, who is best known as the grace administrator on the Apollo 13 mission, the unsuccessful slug assignment that was dramatized in the 1995 flick starring Tom Hanks.

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