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Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle who also led last year's harrowing return to flight after the Columbia disaster, said Monday she will leave the space agency. Collins, 49, said she wanted to spend more time with her family and pursue other interests. Named an astronaut in 1990, she became the first female pilot on a space shuttle with the flight of Discovery in 1995, the first to rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir.

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More than three years after Columbia disintegrated over Texas, the shortcomings of the space shuttle's external fuel tank have made the nation's space program the hostage of an exasperating piece of hardware on the threshold of obsolescence. Fourteen times since Columbia went down Feb. 1, 2003, NASA has postponed shuttle launches, and in all but one case, engineers cited problems with the external tank as the main reason. Hurricane damage to NASA facilities accounted for the other.

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Despite concerns raised by some engineers, NASA said Friday that it plans to put off any further design changes to the shuttle's external fuel tank until after Discovery's flight in July. The space agency had been considering changing the design of the tank's so-called ice frost ramps to stop insulating foam from falling off. The ice frost ramps are wedge-shaped brackets that hold in place the tank's pressurization lines.

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After a series of delays, a pair of NASA satellites blasted off early Friday on a mission to study how clouds affect weather and climate. A Boeing Delta II rocket carrying the CloudSat and Calipso satellites launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California shortly after 3 a.m. Once in orbit, the satellites will join the "A-Train" constellation.

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