Following a meeting between the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programmes and the space operations mission directorate’s senior management NASA has concluded that
- STS-133/Discovery now becomes the Launch-On-Need (LON) vehicle for the STS-132/ULF-4 mission targeted for 14 May launch
- STS-133/ULF-5 is to fly 16 September
- STS-134/ULF6/AlphaMagneticSpectrometer is targeted for mid-November
- AMS should be at Kennedy Space Center in late August – so STS-134 date is still fluid
- While November is the new “no earlier than” launch date for STS-134/Endeavour, due to ISS traffic with Soyuz, ATV and HTV a flight timeframe of “end of CY2010 and early into CY2011” is said to be “challenging”