Space Shuttle Goes Back to Work

dalewj writes "The Discovery rolled over from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center this morning. May 15th is the scheduled launch for STS-114. I was at NASA last month and got to see the payload for the space station thru lots of glass and I have to wonder, how far behind is the space station at this point?"

Comments

ISS Schedule

[caryw]

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/assembly/
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Re:Didn't count?

[nbehary]

I think it's more because that mission, STS-107, had been delayed several times. If you look back, a lot of the missions were flown out of order. And 107 was always purely scientific, so Columbia was a "good" choice, since the mission didn't need to go to ISS.

Re:Didn't count?

[B747SP]

The Challenger incident (you Americans like to call it 'disaster' apparently!) was mission STS-51-L. The Columbia incident was mission STS-107.

AFAICS, NASA assigns a new mission number pretty much every time someone gets it in his head that it would be a good idea to fly a mission to achive "x". In practice, not all missions that are assigned numbers actually fly - some get canned for various reasons. Missions don't necessarily fly in numerical order. Various reasons - delays, political expediency, changing degrees of importance, readiness of payload, crew, shuttle to fly, etc, etc, cause missions to occur out of sequence sometimes.

Re:Not far behind

[tmortn]

Not very far behind ? Not quite sure how you arrive at that notion. We were supposed to be about 20-24 some odd launches along by now and I think either just have or just about to deliver the last bit of core complete construction payloads. At a launch rate of 10 a year that is almost 2 and half years behind if we start launching at the same rate we were before columbia which was the heavist launch schedule in the entire history of the Shuttle program.

Soyuz kept Station manned.... barely. We had to cut to two crew because they could not have supplied 3. Science upmass is all but nothing. 50kg or some such silly pathetic amount. Not knocking it but the program has not advanced in the interim. It has survived on a minimal existence.

Station is VERY behind. To the point where it is a very real possibility that its usefull completed life will be less than half of its planned life. It quite possibly will never house its inteded full crew complement of 7 for any longer than shuttle docking events. You want to know something crazy about that? If the Russians build and deliver their lab (doubtful at this point) and the COF and JEM get delivered, we will have more Labs (4) on Station than Crew (3).