NASA Updates Upcoming Shuttle Launchings
Recently NASA officials have updated and revised the upcoming space shuttle missions for the second half of 2008. Both programs, the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle programs, agreed to the recent changes for that time frame. A meeting at NASA’s Johnson Space Center was held to evaluate what options were open to them, being held after the STS-122 mission delay.
The March 11 Endeavour STS-123 mission and the April 24 Discovery STS-124 mission are now being assessed and coordinated with the NASA international partners. It will not be until the present mission of the Atlantis space shuttle is completed and returned back to Earth before any actual decisions will be made regarding those two missions.
The 2008 shuttle mission launch dates are:
* August 28-Atlantis STS-125 in order to service the Hubble Space Telescope
* October 16-Endeavour STS-126 to deliver equipment to the International Space Station
* December 4-Discover STS-119 to deliver the final set of solar arrays to the Iss
No assessment has been done yet for launchings beyond those days, yet the shuttle and NASA officials are looking at many options open to them for scheduling the remainder of the shuttle flights. And there is always the fact that the spacecrafts are being retired in the near future, with its main objective to complete the construction of the International Space Station. The official plan is to retire the space shuttles sometime around 2010.
The four pressurized modules have been at the peak of construction for the ISS–the already present European science lab, two upcoming Japanese labs, and the Italian-built service nodes–with current plans for solar arrays, additional trusses, a power platform, an observation module, and a centrifuge module needing to be totally completed before the missions can end.
The space shuttle Atlantis, which is present at the ISS now after delivering the Columbus lab, was originally to be retired in 2008, yet now will work through until 2010. Both STS-122 and STS-125 will be her main flights until then. Her parts were to be mechanically donored out for the Discovery and the Endeavour as they needed them. Possibly the Atlantis will do STS-127 also, once the decisions will be made after her coming back Monday.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
