Program Offering Waivers for Health Law Is Ending

No more applications will be accepted after Sept. 22, federal health officials said.

Steven B. Larsen, director of the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, said employers and labor unions had until that date to seek exemptions or request the extension of waivers already granted.

The new health care law generally requires employers to provide at least $750,000 in coverage to each person in their health insurance plans this year. Many restaurants, retailers and small businesses do not meet the standard. Some provide “mini-med” coverage with annual limits that may be as low as $10,000.

“Mini-med plans do not provide comprehensive health coverage, but unfortunately they are the only insurance options some consumers have today,” Mr. Larsen said.

The minimum amount of coverage will increase. Federal rules require health plans to provide at least $1.25 million in coverage next year and $2 million in 2013. In 2014, annual limits for new health plans will be banned. In that year, individuals and small businesses will be able to buy comprehensive coverage through state-supervised insurance exchanges.

Waivers granted or renewed in the next three months will run through 2013. To date, the administration has granted waivers to 1,433 health plans covering 3.2 million people.

On Friday, the administration disclosed that it had denied 100 applications and then approved nearly one-third of them after reconsidering the evidence.

To obtain waivers, employers and health plans must show that compliance with the federal requirements would cause a significant increase in premiums or a significant decrease in access to benefits. Without waivers, some employers said, they would have increased premiums or dropped coverage this year because they could not afford to provide higher health benefits.

Republicans have seized on the waivers as evidence that the law is fundamentally flawed.

“If the law is so good, why are more and more employers begging for a waiver to get relief from its burdensome mandates?” asked Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming. “Americans need waivers from the president’s law because it causes health premiums to go up.”

The policy announced Friday may eliminate the waivers as an issue in the 2012 election year. Under the policy, the administration said, employers and insurers with annual coverage limits below $2 million will have “a reasonable opportunity” to apply for waivers in the next three months.

Republicans have repeatedly asserted that the administration was giving preferential treatment to its political allies by granting waivers to health plans sponsored by labor unions that had supported the legislation. But in a study this week, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said health officials had used objective criteria in deciding whether to grant waivers.

E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade group, said that ending the waivers was “a wise, appropriate step for the administration to take.”

“This step will avoid unnecessary politics and furor over the waivers,” Mr. Trautwein said.

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NATO Begins Helicopter Attacks in Hopes of Ending the Stalemate With Qaddafi

 

Two American-built Apache helicopters operating from a British helicopter-carrier ship plying the Mediterranean 20 miles off the Libyan coast attacked targets before dawn near the oil city of Brega. British reporters aboard the Royal Navy ship Ocean said that both helicopters returned safely after missions lasting less than two hours. Defense officials in Paris said that French helicopters flying from the helicopter carrier Tonnerre also joined in the Brega strikes.

NATO said in a statement that the British helicopters had successfully attacked “military vehicles, military equipment and fielded forces.”

NATO officials have said that they regard the introduction of attack helicopters — the British Apaches and two French helicopter types, the Tigre and the Gazelle — as potential game changers in a conflict that has shown signs of settling into a stalemate. They say the helicopters’ advantage over airstrikes conducted from fast jets flying as high as 20,000 feet is their enhanced ability to carry out precision strikes against Qaddafi forces operating in urban areas, and to pinpoint targets like snipers or small groups of loyalist fighters hiding among civilians or close to schools and hospitals.

But the helicopters also introduce a new level of vulnerability for NATO pilots. Libya still has some scattered air defenses, consisting mainly of portable antiaircraft missiles and truck-mounted systems, which could pose dangers to relatively slow, low-flying helicopters.

The helicopter attacks were begun a week after Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France approved the deployment of attack helicopters from each of their forces, describing the move as intended to increase the military pressure on Colonel Qaddafi. NATO leaders, including President Obama, have called on the Libyan leader to abandon power and leave Libya, demands that he has repeatedly rejected.

Previously, all of 3,640 strike sorties flown during the 11-week air campaign had been by fixed-wing attack jets or missile-carrying Predator drones, following up on an initial barrage by cruise missiles.

The British version of the Apache flies at a maximum speed of about 160 miles an hour, compared with the potentially supersonic Tornado, Typhoon and Rafale jets that have conducted most of the British and French attacks in the air campaign.

The commander of the British helicopter carrier told reporters aboard the ship that the targets struck early on Saturday included a radar site and an “armed checkpoint” near Brega, a Qaddafi-held port in eastern Libya that has been a major export point and servicing center for Libya’s oil industry. French officials said that French helicopters attacked a military camp, apparently one that a NATO statement described as comprising 14 military vehicles, as well as “two shelters and 12 tents.”

With the costs of the air campaign mounting, and the stresses growing on air crews, finding a way of breaking the stalemate has become a priority for NATO, and particularly for Britain and France, which are carrying the brunt of the campaign.

Mr. Obama has let NATO allies take the lead in the Libyan operations, an unusual role for them in the history of such operations. The United States’ role has been confined primarily to air refueling, airborne command and control, surveillance and the deployment of missile-carrying drones.

Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander who oversees the air campaign from a base in Naples, Italy, issued a statement on Saturday calling the helicopters’ first missions successful and adding: “We will continue to use these assets whenever and wherever needed.”

Within hours of the Brega attacks, Britain’s Foreign Office announced that Foreign Secretary William Hague had arrived in the rebel capital, Benghazi, for talks with rebel leaders. The London statement said that Mr. Hague’s trip was “meant to show support for citizens fighting the rule” of Colonel Qaddafi.

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Democrats’ Plan Would Offset Deficit by Ending Big Oil’s Tax Breaks

 

With high gas prices and rising federal deficits in the political spotlight, senior Democrats believe that tying the two together will put pressure on Senate Republicans to support the measure or face a difficult time explaining their opposition to voters whose family budgets are being strained by fuel prices.

President Obama and some top Congressional Democrats have said they want to take some of an estimated $21 billion in savings from ending the tax breaks and steer it to clean energy projects. But the Senate’s Democratic leadership is calculating that using it to cut the deficit instead makes it a tougher issue politically for Republicans who are trying to burnish their conservative fiscal credentials.

“Big Oil certainly doesn’t need the collective money of taxpayers in this country,” said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the authors of the legislation that Democrats intend to showcase. “This is as good a time as any in terms of pain at the pump and in revenues needed for deficit reduction.”

As part of the effort to build support for the measure, the Senate Finance Committee has invited multinational oil company executives to discuss the tax subsidies and other government incentives at a hearing on Thursday.

Many Republicans are certain to oppose the proposal, making it hard for Democrats to assemble the 60 votes that will be needed to break a filibuster, given the resistance from energy-state senators in their own ranks. Republicans have characterized calls by Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats to end the breaks as backdoor tax increases that will only increase gas prices.

“Instead of returning again and again to tax hikes that increase consumers’ costs, the administration and its Democrat allies in Congress should open their eyes to the vast energy resources we have right here at home and to the hundreds of thousands of jobs that opening them up could create,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a statement.

Hoping to reinforce that point, House Republicans are set to approve legislation this week that would expand the coastal areas where energy companies can explore and produce oil and gas.

Democrats say they tailored their bill to make it harder for Republicans to reject after Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Mr. Menendez wrote to colleagues last week that their goal was to “proceed with a bill that maximizes our chances of garnering bipartisan appeal.”

As currently written, the bill would apply only to what Democrats have identified as the five largest and most profitable oil companies: BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and Conoco Phillips. Those involved in writing the measure said they restricted it to those firms by using a definition that applied to major oil companies with certain levels of revenue. Democrats say they believe that approach thwarts Republican arguments that eliminating the tax breaks could affect more than just the major oil firms.

The proposal would end a series of tax advantages for the five companies and produce about $21 billion over 10 years, Democrats say.

More than $12 billion would come from eliminating a domestic manufacturing tax deduction for the big oil companies, and $6 billion would be generated by ending their deductions for taxes paid to foreign governments. Critics suggest that the companies have been able to disguise what should be foreign royalty payments as taxes to reduce their tax liability. The bill would also deny the companies the ability to deduct some intangible drilling and development costs, producing another $2 billion.

Some Congressional Democrats, including Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who heads the Finance Committee, have proposed using the revenue from the elimination of the tax breaks to promote alternative fuels and provide incentives to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles. Mr. Obama has made similar suggestions, and in his regular address over the weekend he again called for more emphasis on the development of clean energy.

But top Democrats said that reallocating the money that way would allow Republicans to accuse Democrats of picking winners and losers in the energy industry. At the same time, the strict focus on the deficit could cause unrest among Democrats who support alternative energy projects.

Last week’s sudden dip in oil prices, which could show up at the pump soon, might also sap momentum behind the tax measure.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, noted that Democrats typically criticize oil companies when gas prices are high. He pointed to remarks made by Democrats at a 1974 Senate hearing that echoed the current talk of soaring profits and industry bonanzas.

“These guys need a new playbook,” Mr. Stewart said.

But Democrats said they see themselves as occupying the political and policy high ground in this case. They noted that top Republicans like Speaker John A. Boehner and Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee, have suggested that industry subsidies might have to be curbed.

Even talk of Republican delaying tactics does not seem to disturb Democrats who are eager to engage in a fight about oil.

“I am happy to have this debate on the floor for days,” Mr. Menendez said.

 

DealBook: Warner Music Is Sold, Ending a Long Auction

 Kevin Mazur/Hope for Haiti Now, via European Pressphoto AgencyMadonna is among Warner Music’s artists.Rick Maiman/Bloomberg News Len Blavatnik is buying Warner Music and is expected to try to buy EMI.

8:52 p.m. | Updated

The Warner Music Group agreed on Friday to sell itself to the Russian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik for a total of about $3.3 billion, ending a months-long auction of the music company that is the home of artists including Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eric Clapton.

The deal puts Mr. Blavatnik, who came to America as a penniless teenager and built a $10 billion empire by investing in oil and metal companies, at the helm of the world’s third-largest music company. It also sets up another potential blockbuster deal: Mr. Blavatnik is hoping to use his fortune to bid on the EMI Group and merge it with Warner Music, creating the world’s largest record company, people involved in the deal said.

The sale of Warner Music, long considered a trophy asset given its glamorous heritage, comes as the record industry continues to struggle with its transition to a digital future. Digital music downloads have been rising, but not nearly at fast enough a pace to replace the revenue lost from falling CD sales. Mr. Blavatnik will also have to contend with Warner Music’s strained financials; the company’s revenue declined 6.7 percent to less than $3 billion last year. His investment company will assume Warner Music’s roughly $2 billion of debt in the deal, as well as pay about $1.3 billion in cash.

Most analysts said Warner Music shareholders would receive a surprisingly rich payday — $8.25 a share, which is about 34 percent higher than Warner Music’s average stock price over the last six months. When the auction started, it was unclear if anyone at all would bid or whether bidders would seek to carve the company up.

“For Warner Music, it’s almost the perfect scenario,” said Tuna N. Amobi, a media analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. “The best outcome for the auction is to sell the entire company, and the value they’re getting is at the high of any estimate.”

Warner Music had attracted dozens of potential buyers, from other music companies to billionaires seeking to rub elbows with rock ’n’ roll celebrities.

At one point in the bidding — in what would have been a remarkable twist — Sean Parker, the billionaire co-founder of Napster, which nearly ruined the music industry with its free file-sharing, expressed an interest in making an offer as part of a consortium with the billionaire Ron Burkle.

By this week, however, three suitors had emerged with strong prospects. Mr. Blavatnik; Tom and Alec Gores, brothers who run their own private equity shops; and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which had been working with the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman and the investment firm Guggenheim Partners.

Mr. Blavatnik had long been seen as the most likely winner of the bidding. A former Warner Music board member, he has retained close ties to top company officials like Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., the company’s chairman and chief executive.

“I am excited to extend my longstanding involvement with Warner Music,” Mr. Blavatnik said in a statement. “It is a great company with a strong heritage and home to many exceptional artists.”

Since immigrating to the United States in 1978, Mr. Blavatnik has become one of the world’s richest men through his varied investments, primarily in the industrial sector. His company, Access Industries, owns stakes in TNK-BP, the Russian oil giant, and LyondellBasell, a chemical company that has rebounded from bankruptcy. (Mr. Blavatnik is fending off a lawsuit by that company’s creditors, who contend that his takeover of the chemical maker piled it with an unsustainable amount of debt.)

His next big quest, people close to him said, will be to try to buy EMI, too, a transaction that virtually everyone on Wall Street seems to be anticipating.

“The next step is that I would expect Access to look at buying part or all of EMI and making a larger record company, to consolidate the industry into three competitors rather than four,” said Laura Martin, an entertainment and media analyst with Needham & Company. “That helps pricing power, and also helps business-model innovation go faster.”

Besides EMI and Warner, the other two big music companies are the Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

EMI was seized by Citigroup earlier this year after its owner, the British private equity firm Terra Firma, defaulted on a $5 billion loan. Combining Warner and EMI, analysts say, could eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in redundancies, making the investment profitable.

But a deal would likely face regulatory scrutiny. Just hours after Mr. Blavatnik’s deal with Warner was announced, Impala, an independent music industry group based in Europe, put out a statement saying, “Any attempt to combine EMI with Warner would similarly be blocked unless there are substantial remedies to solve the competition problems of going from four to three majors.”

The sale of Warner Music, however, is music to the ears of its controlling investors, a group of private equity investors who were questioned at the time they acquired the company from Time Warner in 2004. The investors — THL Partners, Mr. Bronfman, Bain Capital and Providence Equity Partners — had bested a rival bid by, of all companies, the EMI Group. THL held the biggest position at about 51 percent, including co-investors, having poured about $525 million of its own money into the deal. Bain Capital held about a 25 percent stake, while Mr. Bronfman and Providence split most of the remainder of the equity.

The buyout group reaped a significant payday during their first year of investment, when Warner Music paid out about $1.4 billion in dividends to its shareholders.

The investors are expecting a return of about two times their initial investment from the deal with Mr. Blavatnik. THL alone expects to generate an internal rate of return of about 34 percent, some of these people said.

The deal with Mr. Blavatnik is expected to close in the third quarter. He is expected to finance the purchase with cash on hand, as well as with financing provided by Credit Suisse and UBS.

Warner Music was advised by Goldman Sachs; AGM Partners, the advisory firm run by Alan Mnuchin; and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Access was advised by Credit Suisse, UBS and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

Ben Protess and Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting.

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Chicago News Cooperative : Sheriff Points the Way to Ending the Mess With Patronage Hiring

Tom Dart made Rahm Emanuel’s campaign easier by not running for mayor. Now Mr. Dart, the Cook County sheriff, might have simplified Mr. Emanuel’s governing by giving him a road map — and an amateur video — to solve a 42-year-old city mess.

The untidiness is the anti-patronage Shakman case, the suit filed against the City of Chicago and other local government bodies in 1969. The case prompted federal court decrees barring hiring, promoting and firing based on political factors for most public jobs and prohibited political work during office hours.

It drones on after decades of resistance — until now. Last week, Mr. Dart’s office became the first defendant found in compliance. That, inevitably, raised questions as to what Mayor Richard M. Daley’s problem has been in doing likewise.

“Dart just did a bang-up job,” said Clifford Meacham, a former Cook County judge who in 2008 was appointed by a federal judge to oversee compliance at the then-wildly disorganized 7,000-employee sheriff’s office.

Twenty-nine months later, a federal magistrate just dismissed the sheriff from the Shakman case because he has dealt ably with illegal and other dubious practices. The legal tab is $5.3 million, including $2.4 million for Mr. Meacham and his staff, $1.3 million for outside lawyers at Hinshaw & Culbertson, $918,000 for the lawyer Michael Shakman and aides and $762,000 to claimants.

Mr. Shakman, who brought the suit the year Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon and Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, concurred with the magistrate’s decision “because we think the sheriff has done a good job,” he said. “He’s sent the message that patronage practices are not tolerated.”

That meant personally telling managers that there would be consequences if they didn’t comply. The sheriff’s office developed comprehensive employment rules and hired both a former prosecutor to head a Compliance Office and a former F.B.I. agent to oversee an existing Office of Professional Review to deal with claims of political discrimination.

“It’s just a question of will, to want to see it resolved” Mr. Dart said. “I’d be lying if I said it was easy. But we decided it was something we wanted to put behind us. How can you expect a work force to operate well if they think everything is rigged?”

I watched a training video for employees that Mr. Meacham had produced. Its production values suit public-access cable TV — and that’s being charitable. But Mr. Emanuel should view it.

Mr. Meacham beckoned lawyer, judge and even receptionist chums to act out six miniscenes. After introductory remarks by Mr. Meacham and Mr. Dart, his not-quite-ready-for-prime-time players haltingly portrayed a job interviewer soliciting political support for a boss from an applicant; a supervisor turning a deaf ear to a worker’s claim that a secretary colleague with clout does scant work; and a jail guard flaunting political ties to get a promotion, among others.

The sixth scene is a small, rough gem: Judge Jesse Reyes of Cook County Circuit Court plays a boss firing a jail guard — Rod, played by Matthew Lakoma, a lawyer — for incompetence. But a door swings opens for an alderman right out of “The Front Page,” with fat cigar and fedora, played by Ricardo Meza, Gov. Pat Quinn’s real-life inspector general.

“You know who I am?” thunders the alderman. “Rod’s one of us! And you want to bounce him? Can’t we work this out?”

After each scene, Mr. Meacham appears. “This is completely wrong, completely unlawful,” he says after the scene with the guard trying to get a promotion and the willing supervisor.

Mr. Meacham works for a private dispute-resolution firm, JAMS, where his colleagues include Wayne Andersen, the newly retired federal judge who had jurisdiction over the entire Shakman case for a decade. Mr. Andersen told me that, three years ago, he had an “extended meeting” with Mr. Daley, held at the office of a friend of Mr. Andersen to avoid rampant speculation at the courthouse.

Mr. Daley’s relationship to illegal personnel practices has long been debated. Is it really possible that 49 administration aides and others could be convicted of criminal fraud over the past seven years, starting with the Hired Truck scandal, and he had not known of the illegalities?

“I don’t doubt his sincerity,” Mr. Andersen said, noting that “there has never been evidence Daley knew.” He conceded Mr. Daley probably did not give the subject “the attention it deserved.”

Of course, Mr. Daley, a master of detail, might well have known about kinky doings.

As for Mr. Emanuel, he has bigger fish to fry with budget and schools ills. But when it comes to the Shakman cesspool, he has to let everybody know he means business. And there may be low-hanging fruit among 80 current workers “directly implicated” in illegal practices, according to federal records.

As Mr. Meacham put it, he has to take some people on and take them out.

 

With ‘Coolest Job Ever’ Ending, Astronauts Seek Next Frontier

Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week, and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in June — and all the seats are spoken for.

“Morale is pretty low,” said Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”

Under President Obama, NASA’s human spaceflight program has been curtailed. The Ares I and Constellation programs, which were meant to succeed the space shuttles and take astronauts to the moon, were canceled, and NASA is instead hiring outside companies to devise alternatives.

So when the Obama family heads to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week to sit with Gabrielle Giffords, the injured Arizona congresswoman, as she watches her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, take off for the International Space Station, it will be one of the last spectacles of its kind for a while. Over the next few years, American astronauts will be competing for a handful of slots on the International Space Station, flying there on Russian Soyuz capsules.

“We hope we will overcome this hurdle and continue to explore,” said Peggy A. Whitson, the head of NASA’s astronaut office, whose job includes selecting the astronauts who will fly each space mission. While people’s spirits are a little down, she said, “we’ll have to see — NASA has gone through different phases like this before.”

The current situation may not dampen the career aspirations of the elementary school set, but last year alone, 20 astronauts left NASA’s active-duty roster; today, 61 remain, down from a peak of about 150 in 2000. Back then, NASA was gearing up to staff the International Space Station and the shuttles that supplied it.

The shift has made a big difference to people like John M. Grunsfeld, the Dr. Fix-It of the Hubble Space Telescope, who has flown five missions for NASA. After his last flight, in May 2009, he asked Dr. Whitson about his chances of returning to space. “She was honest,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “Slim to none.”

If Dr. Whitson had dangled even a small chance at a plum assignment, like commanding the International Space Station, “I probably would have stayed,” said Dr. Grunsfeld, 52. But she did not. So in January 2010, he left NASA to become deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates the Hubble.

Another astronaut for whom the new realities presented a problem was Capt. Scott D. Altman of the Navy, who has flown four missions for NASA. But at 6-foot-4, he does not fit into a Soyuz capsule.

After his last shuttle flight in 2009, Captain Altman, 51, saw the writing on the wall. As he wrestled with the decision over whether to leave NASA, the Obama administration made the decision to scrap Constellation and Ares I. He announced last August that he would depart.

Leaving NASA “was the right decision,” Captain Altman said, but “there are some regrets from time to time.” He now works for ASRC Research and Technology Solutions in Maryland, which does engineering work for NASA and other federal agencies.

NASA will still be hiring astronauts, though not people of Captain Altman’s vintage. In the next year or two, as more people leave or retire, the agency will recruit a new class of 6 to 12 astronauts, Dr. Whitson said. If NASA decides to reduce tours of duty at the space station from six months to four, that would mean a need for even more astronauts.

“We briefed the entire office on what to expect,” said Dr. Whitson, who is herself an astronaut.

Meanwhile, opportunities for astronauts outside of NASA are small but growing.

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s empire, is seeking three space pilots for its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which may begin space tourism trips next year. While SpaceShipTwo will take suborbital hops that provide only a few minutes of weightlessness, other companies — like Boeing and the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX — are developing spacecraft that will be able to fly to the International Space Station and elsewhere.

Garrett E. Reisman, who joined the astronaut corps in 1998, left NASA last month for SpaceX, which was founded by the Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk. Dr. Reisman had logged more than three months in space and done work on the space station’s robotic arm.

“Being an astronaut is the coolest job ever,” said Dr. Reisman, 43. “It was very, very difficult to voluntarily leave.”

If Dr. Reisman had stayed at NASA, he would have had a chance to fly again, but he decided to move on. Now he is working on a rocket (the Falcon 9) and a spacecraft (the Dragon) that are meant to take passengers and cargo to the space station.

“It’s an engineer’s dream to design a spaceship,” he said. “To me, it seems like we’re on the verge of a golden age of spaceflight — that’s where I wanted to be.”

For every astronaut who quits NASA because of age or a lack of opportunity, there are any number of young people aspiring to fill their shoes.

The job is still as romantic as the standards are stringent. According to NASA’s Web site, astronaut candidates must be able to swim three lengths of a pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes; an advanced degree in science or math is a plus.

The requirements are even stricter for people who want to work in the space station: you must speak Russian, know robotics, be trained for spacewalks and be healthy enough to spend six months in space.

This formidable checklist has helped NASA nudge some astronauts aside. But it has not dulled anyone’s memories.

“Being in space is like being someplace magic,” said Col. Pamela Ann Melroy of the Air Force, the second female astronaut to command a shuttle mission. She left NASA in 2009, knowing that there would be intense jockeying by astronauts seeking to command one of the few remaining flights.

“I didn’t really want to get into situation where I was hanging around hoping that I would get one of them,” she said.

Colonel Melroy is still wistful about the lost prospect of flying on the Ares I. “That would have been a hoot,” she said.

 

With ‘Coolest Job Ever’ Ending, Astronauts Seek Next Frontier

Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week, and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in June — and all the seats are spoken for.

“Morale is pretty low,” said Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”

Under President Obama, NASA’s human spaceflight program has been curtailed. The Ares I and Constellation programs, which were meant to succeed the space shuttles and take astronauts to the moon, were canceled, and NASA is instead hiring outside companies to devise alternatives.

So when the Obama family heads to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week to sit with Gabrielle Giffords, the injured Arizona congresswoman, as she watches her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, take off for the International Space Station, it will be one of the last spectacles of its kind for a while. Over the next few years, American astronauts will be competing for a handful of slots on the International Space Station, flying there on Russian Soyuz capsules.

“We hope we will overcome this hurdle and continue to explore,” said Peggy A. Whitson, the head of NASA’s astronaut office, whose job includes selecting the astronauts who will fly each space mission. While people’s spirits are a little down, she said, “we’ll have to see — NASA has gone through different phases like this before.”

The current situation may not dampen the career aspirations of the elementary school set, but last year alone, 20 astronauts left NASA’s active-duty roster; today, 61 remain, down from a peak of about 150 in 2000. Back then, NASA was gearing up to staff the International Space Station and the shuttles that supplied it.

The shift has made a big difference to people like John M. Grunsfeld, the Dr. Fix-It of the Hubble Space Telescope, who has flown five missions for NASA. After his last flight, in May 2009, he asked Dr. Whitson about his chances of returning to space. “She was honest,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “Slim to none.”

If Dr. Whitson had dangled even a small chance at a plum assignment, like commanding the International Space Station, “I probably would have stayed,” said Dr. Grunsfeld, 52. But she did not. So in January 2010, he left NASA to become deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates the Hubble.

Another astronaut for whom the new realities presented a problem was Capt. Scott D. Altman of the Navy, who has flown four missions for NASA. But at 6-foot-4, he does not fit into a Soyuz capsule.

After his last shuttle flight in 2009, Captain Altman, 51, saw the writing on the wall. As he wrestled with the decision over whether to leave NASA, the Obama administration made the decision to scrap Constellation and Ares I. He announced last August that he would depart.

Leaving NASA “was the right decision,” Captain Altman said, but “there are some regrets from time to time.” He now works for ASRC Research and Technology Solutions in Maryland, which does engineering work for NASA and other federal agencies.

NASA will still be hiring astronauts, though not people of Captain Altman’s vintage. In the next year or two, as more people leave or retire, the agency will recruit a new class of 6 to 12 astronauts, Dr. Whitson said. If NASA decides to reduce tours of duty at the space station from six months to four, that would mean a need for even more astronauts.

“We briefed the entire office on what to expect,” said Dr. Whitson, who is herself an astronaut.

Meanwhile, opportunities for astronauts outside of NASA are small but growing.

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s empire, is seeking three space pilots for its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which may begin space tourism trips next year. While SpaceShipTwo will take suborbital hops that provide only a few minutes of weightlessness, other companies — like Boeing and the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX — are developing spacecraft that will be able to fly to the International Space Station and elsewhere.

Garrett E. Reisman, who joined the astronaut corps in 1998, left NASA last month for SpaceX, which was founded by the Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk. Dr. Reisman had logged more than three months in space and done work on the space station’s robotic arm.

“Being an astronaut is the coolest job ever,” said Dr. Reisman, 43. “It was very, very difficult to voluntarily leave.”

If Dr. Reisman had stayed at NASA, he would have had a chance to fly again, but he decided to move on. Now he is working on a rocket (the Falcon 9) and a spacecraft (the Dragon) that are meant to take passengers and cargo to the space station.

“It’s an engineer’s dream to design a spaceship,” he said. “To me, it seems like we’re on the verge of a golden age of spaceflight — that’s where I wanted to be.”

For every astronaut who quits NASA because of age or a lack of opportunity, there are any number of young people aspiring to fill their shoes.

The job is still as romantic as the standards are stringent. According to NASA’s Web site, astronaut candidates must be able to swim three lengths of a pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes; an advanced degree in science or math is a plus.

The requirements are even stricter for people who want to work in the space station: you must speak Russian, know robotics, be trained for spacewalks and be healthy enough to spend six months in space.

This formidable checklist has helped NASA nudge some astronauts aside. But it has not dulled anyone’s memories.

“Being in space is like being someplace magic,” said Col. Pamela Ann Melroy of the Air Force, the second female astronaut to command a shuttle mission. She left NASA in 2009, knowing that there would be intense jockeying by astronauts seeking to command one of the few remaining flights.

“I didn’t really want to get into situation where I was hanging around hoping that I would get one of them,” she said.

Colonel Melroy is still wistful about the lost prospect of flying on the Ares I. “That would have been a hoot,” she said.

 

With ‘Coolest Job Ever’ Ending, Astronauts Seek Next Frontier

Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week, and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in June — and all the seats are spoken for.

“Morale is pretty low,” said Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”

Under President Obama, NASA’s human spaceflight program has been curtailed. The Ares I and Constellation programs, which were meant to succeed the space shuttles and take astronauts to the moon, were canceled, and NASA is instead hiring outside companies to devise alternatives.

So when the Obama family heads to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week to sit with Gabrielle Giffords, the injured Arizona congresswoman, as she watches her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, take off for the International Space Station, it will be one of the last spectacles of its kind for a while. Over the next few years, American astronauts will be competing for a handful of slots on the International Space Station, flying there on Russian Soyuz capsules.

“We hope we will overcome this hurdle and continue to explore,” said Peggy A. Whitson, the head of NASA’s astronaut office, whose job includes selecting the astronauts who will fly each space mission. While people’s spirits are a little down, she said, “we’ll have to see — NASA has gone through different phases like this before.”

The current situation may not dampen the career aspirations of the elementary school set, but last year alone, 20 astronauts left NASA’s active-duty roster; today, 61 remain, down from a peak of about 150 in 2000. Back then, NASA was gearing up to staff the International Space Station and the shuttles that supplied it.

The shift has made a big difference to people like John M. Grunsfeld, the Dr. Fix-It of the Hubble Space Telescope, who has flown five missions for NASA. After his last flight, in May 2009, he asked Dr. Whitson about his chances of returning to space. “She was honest,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “Slim to none.”

If Dr. Whitson had dangled even a small chance at a plum assignment, like commanding the International Space Station, “I probably would have stayed,” said Dr. Grunsfeld, 52. But she did not. So in January 2010, he left NASA to become deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates the Hubble.

Another astronaut for whom the new realities presented a problem was Capt. Scott D. Altman of the Navy, who has flown four missions for NASA. But at 6-foot-4, he does not fit into a Soyuz capsule.

After his last shuttle flight in 2009, Captain Altman, 51, saw the writing on the wall. As he wrestled with the decision over whether to leave NASA, the Obama administration made the decision to scrap Constellation and Ares I. He announced last August that he would depart.

Leaving NASA “was the right decision,” Captain Altman said, but “there are some regrets from time to time.” He now works for ASRC Research and Technology Solutions in Maryland, which does engineering work for NASA and other federal agencies.

NASA will still be hiring astronauts, though not people of Captain Altman’s vintage. In the next year or two, as more people leave or retire, the agency will recruit a new class of 6 to 12 astronauts, Dr. Whitson said. If NASA decides to reduce tours of duty at the space station from six months to four, that would mean a need for even more astronauts.

“We briefed the entire office on what to expect,” said Dr. Whitson, who is herself an astronaut.

Meanwhile, opportunities for astronauts outside of NASA are small but growing.

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s empire, is seeking three space pilots for its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which may begin space tourism trips next year. While SpaceShipTwo will take suborbital hops that provide only a few minutes of weightlessness, other companies — like Boeing and the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX — are developing spacecraft that will be able to fly to the International Space Station and elsewhere.

Garrett E. Reisman, who joined the astronaut corps in 1998, left NASA last month for SpaceX, which was founded by the Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk. Dr. Reisman had logged more than three months in space and done work on the space station’s robotic arm.

“Being an astronaut is the coolest job ever,” said Dr. Reisman, 43. “It was very, very difficult to voluntarily leave.”

If Dr. Reisman had stayed at NASA, he would have had a chance to fly again, but he decided to move on. Now he is working on a rocket (the Falcon 9) and a spacecraft (the Dragon) that are meant to take passengers and cargo to the space station.

“It’s an engineer’s dream to design a spaceship,” he said. “To me, it seems like we’re on the verge of a golden age of spaceflight — that’s where I wanted to be.”

For every astronaut who quits NASA because of age or a lack of opportunity, there are any number of young people aspiring to fill their shoes.

The job is still as romantic as the standards are stringent. According to NASA’s Web site, astronaut candidates must be able to swim three lengths of a pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes; an advanced degree in science or math is a plus.

The requirements are even stricter for people who want to work in the space station: you must speak Russian, know robotics, be trained for spacewalks and be healthy enough to spend six months in space.

This formidable checklist has helped NASA nudge some astronauts aside. But it has not dulled anyone’s memories.

“Being in space is like being someplace magic,” said Col. Pamela Ann Melroy of the Air Force, the second female astronaut to command a shuttle mission. She left NASA in 2009, knowing that there would be intense jockeying by astronauts seeking to command one of the few remaining flights.

“I didn’t really want to get into situation where I was hanging around hoping that I would get one of them,” she said.

Colonel Melroy is still wistful about the lost prospect of flying on the Ares I. “That would have been a hoot,” she said.