Irene Klotz is Senior Space Editor for Aviation Week, based in Cape Canaveral. Before joining Aviation Week in 2017, Irene spent 25 years as a wire service reporter covering human and robotic spaceflight, commercial space, astronomy, science and technology for Reuters and United Press International. She also worked with Discovery Communications, Discovery News and was a founding member of Space.com.
Irene cut her teeth on the space beat at Florida Today newspaper, a business writer enchanted by the colorful entrepreneurs who wanted access to Air Force launch facilities and assets after commercial payloads were taken off the space shuttles following the 1986 Challenger accident. Commercial space remains the focus of her work, along with a keen interest in the search for life beyond Earth.
A graduate of Northwestern University, Irene is the 2014 recipient of the Harry Kolcum Memorial News and Communications Award, named in honor of the late Aviation Week managing editor and Cape Canaveral senior editor who was among Irene’s earliest mentors.
NASA is considering keeping shuttle Discovery as a donor vehicle after it returns from its last scheduled spaceflight this fall. “We’re having the discussions right now as to when we start to take Discovery off of flight status,” Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon said in an interview. “It may be more beneficial to us to keep Discovery in a flight-ready state as a donor vehicle in case Endeavour or Atlantis needed any parts that we didn’t have sufficient stock of.”
Congress and the White House are working on a compromise blueprint for NASA that would maintain a skeletal space shuttle capability, begin heavy-lift booster development, fund an Orion-type capsule for deep space human travel and test alternative contracting arrangements to sire a commercial U.S. human space transportation industry.
A NASA oversight committee unanimously passed a bill July 15 that supports the Obama administration’s plan to end the Constellation Moon program — in name anyway — but replaces the White House’s proposed technology initiatives with a heavy-lift rocket program, continued support for the space shuttle and an Orion-like capsule capable of deep space travel.
