Musgrave To Retire: Story Musgrave, who became the oldest person in space last December on the shuttle, announced on February 10 his plans to retire from NASA this summer. Musgrave, who has flown in space six times, said he decided to leave the agency when NASA confirmed last week that he would not fly on another shuttle mission. Musgrave turned down a NASA offer to help train shuttle astronauts, telling Reuters, "They wanted me to stay and work, but I'm a flier." NASA officials defended their decision to ground Musgrave, noting that over 50 current astronauts have yet to fly a single mission. Musgrave said he's looking at ways to communicate the space experience to the public. "There's five lifetimes of work out there that people want me to do with them," he said. "Space needs to get turned into art, it needs to be communicated, it needs to be expressed."

Pioneer 10 Keeps Going: The Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which turns 25 next month, performed a maneuver in late January to keep its antenna oriented towards Earth. With little power left in the spacecraft, the radio transmitter had to be turned off during the 90-minute maneuver. The spacecraft, operating in the dark, successfully completed the maneuver and the transmitter worked again after turning back on. "We were concerned that turning the transmitter's traveling wave tube off in the deep cold of space for 90 minutes and then back on again would cause a thermal shock that might shatter the helix in the tube," Dr. Larry Lasher, Pioneer project manager, said. A conference marking Pioneer 10's 25th birthday is scheduled for early March, and an online "virtual" conference will allow Internet users to take part.

Hawking Pays Up: Physicist Stephen Hawking admitted defeat -- "on a technicality" -- in a wager with two Caltech physicists on a cosmic question. Hawking argued that a singularity -- a point in spacetime where the laws of physics break down -- could not exist outside of a black hole. But Matthew Choptuik of the University of Texas showed, using computer simulations, that such a "naked" singularity could exist, although it was highly improbable. As payment, Hawking gave Kip Thorne and John Preskill 100 pounds sterling and "clothing embroidered with a suitable concessionary message", which was hardly concessionary: t-shirts with the message "Nature Abhors a Naked Singularity."

Other News: Members of the Galileo team at JPL got to meet Pope John Paul II while visiting Italy for a conference. "The Pope seemed very interested in learning about the Galileo results," project manager Bill O'Neil said. "He encouraged continued exploration of the universe." O'Neil and the Galileo team gave the Pope an album of Galileo images... Shannon Lucid was named the winner of the Freedom Forum's Free Spirit Award, given periodically to those who "embody the principles of free spirit, free press, or free speech." The award includes a $25,000 donation to the NASA College Scholarship Fund. Previous winners have included Barbara Bush, Thurgood Marshall, one-handed major league baseball pitcher Jim Abbott, and the seven members of the STS-61 mission which repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993... Don't forget: NBC is showing the two-part miniseries "Asteroid" starting Sunday night, February 16. While the show appears to have all the appearances of an old Irwin Allen disaster movie, one can only hope that it will increase the public's awareness -- but not the panic factor -- about the threat asteroid and comet impacts pose to the Earth. Now, if deflecting them were as easy as mounting a laser on an F-16...