WASHINGTON – NASA and its 15 international partners have tentatively agreed to expand the international space station beyond its current three-person capacity by the end of the decade.

During a teleconference Friday following a meeting of the partners in the Netherlands, Fred Gregory, deputy administrator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, called the agreement “a very significant step.”

While details are still being worked out, Gregory and Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s station program, said the partners agreed to launch and build all the planned modules of the station. The target date for a larger crew is 2009.

The maximum crew size likely would be six, the number of astronauts that could fit into two Russian Soyuz ships docked at the station in case of an emergency.

Friday’s agreement essentially returns the station’s final setup to the plan that existed before 2001, when NASA scrapped the idea for a habitation module and an escape vehicle capable of carrying seven astronauts. The move eliminated an estimated $4 billion in cost overruns but also limited the station to three people.

Scientists howled at the cuts, saying three people could do only bare-bones science.

Two years ago, NASA chief Sean O’Keefe – who in his former role as White House deputy budget director helped craft the cuts – said repeatedly that a larger crew needed a scientific justification. He pointed to the target date for finishing the basic foundation of the station, then scheduled for February 2004, as the jumping-off point for discussions about expansion.

But the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in February 2003 not only grounded the fleet but also halted construction on the station, which is unlikely to resume until late next year or early 2006.

The accident also prompted NASA and the White House to rethink the purpose of the space program. In January, President Bush proposed a new agenda for NASA, focused on returning astronauts to the moon and on to Mars.

Under the plan, the shuttle fleet would be retired when construction of the station is finished around the end of the decade. Then, most of NASA’s budget would be poured into building a new spacecraft, a more advanced propulsion system and sending unmanned missions to the moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.

The proposal has given the station a fresh purpose – as a research platform for observing the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body, a crucial part of any mission beyond low-Earth orbit.

“In that sense, maybe a push was given by the president’s speech. People can now honestly admit that one of the main purposes of the space station is to develop the technology needed to go back to the moon and on to Mars,” said Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University and the author of several books on the space program.

Exactly how and when the completed station takes form depends on a number of variables, including when the next shuttle flight happens, no earlier than next spring.

NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said the agency thinks it can complete the station without additional money beyond the $9.3 billion it already planned to spend between fiscal 2005 and 2009. That would bring the total spent since 1994 to $30.8 billion.

Meanwhile, NASA continues to prepare shuttle Discovery for the agency’s next flight. At Kennedy Space Center, technicians are nearly finished installing the carbon panels that wrap around the ship’s wings.

One of these panels was damaged during Columbia’s launch, when a chunk of foam insulation from the vehicle’s external tank broke loose and slammed into the wing. The impact created a hole that allowed super-hot gases to penetrate the ship as it re-entered the atmosphere.

NASA is implementing a number of safeguards on the remaining shuttles, including more rigorous inspections of the wings and installing new sensors meant to detect debris strikes to the orbiter. Stephanie Stilson, the NASA manager in charge of Discovery, said technicians have begun laying the wire needed to support the new sensors.

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