Keeping in mind the retirement of the fleet and as per everyone’s expectations NASA has pushed back the launch of its last two space shuttles into 2011. As per the new schedule the two flights are now to take off first in November 2010 and the second one in February 2011. The last two shuttle flights STS-133 and STS-134 were postponed by NASA citing the reason of a delay in the mission’s hardware.
The earlier dates fixed for the take off were September and November 2010. The last voyage of the shuttle Discovery will be seen on November 1st while Endeavor will see the lift off happening on the 26th of February 2011. NASA has thus breathed some more time in the life of the aging space shuttles which are going to be retired thereafter.
Discovery is the oldest space shuttle in the NASA‘s fleet and time has come for it to end its services to the organization. In its last voyage STS-133, the Discovery is assigned the task of delivering the humanoid robot assistant nicknamed the Robonaut 2 to the International Space Station along with a cargo that is to be used as the storage cabinet at the station that will be permanently attached to the station. The primary goals of the space walks are to deliver spare parts and pump up other supplies in thee station.
Florida’s Kennedy Space Center will serve as the launch pad for the shuttle and the delayed hardware’s are the humanoid robot and some other minor equipment like the pump assembly and a heat exchanger.
While the second and the last shuttle in the series will be lifted with a main aim to deliver Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the station that has a price tag of 1.5 billion dollars. The Spectrometer is one of the primary reasons for the pushing back of the launch date of Endeavour since this payload will not be delivered to the Florida space centre till late August and a three month on site processing thereafter.
A late-November/early December launch was ruled out because of conflicts with other planned station launches. Temperature constraints related to the station’s orbit prevented a launch in January, and range conflicts with other unmanned missions pushed the approved launch date to February 26.