Space Forum / Shuttle / February 2006

NASA aims for 8 shuttle launches in 15 months
NASA is aiming to launch eight shuttle missions in 15 months between
May and September 2007, assuming the agency can overcome continuing
external tank foam insulation problems and other challenges.

In an all hands meeting at Kennedy Space Center last week, NASA shuttle
program manager Wayne Hale displayed a chart of notional target launch
dates that showed the agency's fast-paced plans for the resumption of
International Space Station assembly.

There are some huge caveats, however. It's unlikely NASA will be able
to meet the opening of a May 3-May 22 window for its next flight, and
its unlikely more than two missions could be launched this year.

That said, the chart showed NASA plans to launch Discovery May 3 on a
second test flight largely aimed at proving out post-Columbia safety
modifications.

Construction of the half-built station then would resume with the July
1 launch of Atlantis and a portside segment of the outpost's skeletal
truss.

The follow-on flights would include an Oct. 1 flight of Endeavour with
another portside truss segment, and the launch Dec. 7 of a starboard
truss aboard Atlantis.

Next year, a starboard truss would be launched on Endeavour on March
15, and another would be lofted on Discovery on May 3.

A connecting node that would enable NASA to add European and Japanese
science laboratory modules would be launched June 14 on Atlantis.

Then a payload still to be named -- presumably an international partner
laboratory -- would be launched Aug. 23 on Endeavour.

The launch sequence and dates are the same as those shown in an
internal shuttle launch schedule published in The Flame Trench on Nov.
30, 2005.

That manifest also showed NASA aims to finish the station and fly a
final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope by August 2009, a
full year ahead of the Sept. 30, 2010 retirement date for the shuttle
fleet.