damn thats a long time i was hopping it would be sometime this year.

i wouldn’t be surprised if that date is put back even further, whenever they find a problem it leads to another, when it comes down to it nasa needs to retire the shuttle fleet as soon as possible, the only reason they dont is that they have nothing else and dont want to rely on the russians.

I'm afraid they need to retire the Space Shutte. It was a great invention for its time but it has deterioted with age. The Columbia disaster was a clear example of that. If we are serious about furthering space exploration and are more serious about saving lives we need to put serious money into building something that is more capable of handling space flights for many years to come. If they continue to use the Space Shuttle I'm afraid more disaster will follow.