NASA may and has discontinued support for the shuttles, but she had a desire to send astronauts much farther into space than ever before.

These travel, of course still far from realization, but on Monday, astronauts will go under the water to perform the simulation through which scientists can learn how to explore a new direction: the near-earth asteroid.

This will be the 16th NEEMO-expedition - NASA Extreme Enviroment Mission Operations under the control of the astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger. She was one of the last missions of shuttles, and even helped to prepare Atlantis to be his last flight.

"It was a very memorable time," says Metcalfe-Lindenburger, astronaut who really wants again to go back into space. But now, it commands a team of four people who wear scuba instead of a suit. Metcalfe says that it is time to move on.

"As elsewhere in life, my daughter, for example, had to first finish kindergarten and then to go to school. We must finish the old case and to initiate, as well as in space programs," says Metclafe-Lindenburger.

Her team will spend 2 weeks working under the water in a medium which is possible only to the zero gravity of the asteroid.
Their base is in the underwater lab called Aquarius. The size of the station with size of a school bus, and it is situated at a height of 60 feet below the surface, a few miles from the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

Metclafe-Lindenburger says that diving under the water is very much like swimming in the open space.
"Water is a great way to free your body and try other options movement. Just because we're stuck here on the Ground, under water very fun to swim, to turn around, as well as in space," she says.

Astronomer Steve Squares from Cornell University goes in Aquarius second time. His last mission NEEMO broke because of the hurricane.
He is very worried that can get another chance to find out what equipment can help people one day to explore the asteroid. Last time Steve and his companions wore jetpacks and flew with them under water.

"They were very easy to travel to. You have seen the rock of 30 metres and easily jumped over it," he says.
But they were awful if you had to stop for a while, for example, take samples of an asteroid.

"If you have to do something so simple as, for example, hit it against a rock with a hammer, you just fly away into space, so we had to develop a completely new things for operations on the surface of the asteroid," said Steve Squares.
This time, they were going to find out whether a mini-submarine to help them to become stuck in one place.
"Imagine this small submarine with a six-foot beam protruding from the front and astronaut hanging on it as a decoration," says Steve.

NASA hopes to start sending astronauts with equipment on asteroids after 2025.
You may ask, why would anyone need an asteroid, but Steve Squares says that there are many prcen.
Some of them consist of such things as metals which can be produced on Earth. Steve says that we must learn everything you can about the asteroids in order to understand the origin of the Solar system and to protect themselves.

"Asteroids are the threat. They had collided with the ground," he explains. "The asteroid caused the mass extinction. A small asteroid killed all the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We suffer the same fate if we as a species will not be able to prevent it."
Just send a robot to the asteroid's not enough, says Steve. Then there is a very long speech about what difficulties would have arisen if it was sent a robot. Steve is a principal investigator of the project of the Rover (Mars Rover).
"At the moment what the most modern robot can do on Mars per day, any man under the same conditions would have done it for 30 seconds," said Steve.

Metclafe-Lindenburger predicts that as soon as NASA learns how to send people to the asteroids, they will want to get there.
"People by nature are explorers," she says. "We do open with a very very long time." When NASA eventually will send the people away into space, she hopes that it will be one of them.