The aging space shuttle fleet was granted a few more months of life today. NASA decided to postpone the last two flights due to delays with the missions' hardware.

The next launch, STS-133, was pushed from Sept. 16 to Nov. 1. The final shuttle launch, STS-134, was moved from late November 2010 to Feb. 26, 2011.

STS-133 will be the last flight for the Space Shuttle Discovery, NASA's oldest shuttle. Discovery will deliver a humanoid robot assistant called the Robonaut 2 to the International Space Station, as well as a re-purposed cargo pod that will be used as a sort of storage closet.

Delays in getting the robot ready are partly responsible for the new launch date, said NASA Space Ops spokesperson John Yembrick. A few other items, like a pump assembly and a heat exchanger, are also running late.

That's pretty normal, Yembrick said. "There are manufacturing delays, processing delays, getting the stuff space certified for flight, that takes time," he said. "Sometimes you understand when it's going to happen, and then you reevaluate. This is not unusual."

Moving Discovery's flight also pushes back the final flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, which is expected to be the last shuttle flight ever. That mission will bring the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle physics experiment to the space station.

Because of all the traffic going to and from the space station in the winter months, the next available window for launching STS-134 isn't until February 2011.

"It's a busy time on the space station," Yendrick said. An unmanned European craft will be docked to the space station in December, and a Japanese vehicle is slated to fly in January. Because the engineering logistics get so complicated, space agencies try to avoid having the shuttle and other vehicles dock at the space station simultaneously.

Luckily, NASA's budget accounted for the possibility of launch slips. "We will have the funding to fly in February," Yendrick said. "We have the flexibility to do it, so we will."

NASA is still waiting to hear from Congress about whether they might fly one additional mission with the Space Shuttle Atlantis in June 2011. That decision is expected to come in August.

No matter how long they put it off, though, the shuttle team knows the end is coming. "The end of the shuttle era is bittersweet for a lot of people who have dedicated their lives to it," Yendrick said. "But we're all aware that the space shuttle is retiring soon, in the coming months."

Image: NASA

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