Any lingering doubts about the need to retire NASA's space shuttle fleet should be fully erased by the troubles getting the Discovery orbiter off the ground for its final mission. A planned Nov. 1 launch was scrubbed five days in a row due to weather and technical issues, and in the process technicians discovered a more serious problem: cracks in the orbiter's external tank hardware. That unwelcome discovery pushed the launch to late November, then into December and now to no earlier than Feb. 3. As a result, the last shuttle mission on NASA's official mani-rnfest, which had been scheduled for Feb. 27, has been bumped to April 1 at the earliest. This may or may not affect the timing of the additional shuttle mission Congress directed NASA to fly no earlier than June in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act. But the yet-to-be-funded final mission could face delays completely unrelated to manifesting issues, further postponing the end of a program that costs NASA more than S200 million per month.
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