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 (or right) 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.