ARISS Contact with Scouts from Blackland Prarie Elementary School made July 4th 2008.

Audio File: 

Space Station contact_small.mp3

NASA has set target launch dates for the eight space shuttle missions in 2009 and 2010 that are expected to be the fleet's last.

The pre-retirement schedule for the shuttle has 10 remaining flights, including missions already scheduled for Oct. 8 and Nov. 10 of this year.

The plan is to replace the shuttle fleet with the Orion craft, which is being built and tested now.

But first, seven assembly flights are slated to complete construction on the International Space Station, with an additional two contingency flights planned for completion before the end of the fiscal year 2010.

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NASA has awarded Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems Inc. in Houston, a one-year contract extension valued at $42 million to provide integration services for cargo delivery to and from the International Space Station.

Lockheed Martin has held the station's cargo mission contract since January 2004. The one-year extension will bring the total value of the contract to $338 million.

The contract provides cargo packing for delivery to and from the space station, consisting of pressurized and unpressurized science and logistics carriers, assembly hardware and crew support. It also involves determining the most efficient way to pack the cargo, verifying the adequacy of the integrated carriers, packing the pressurized cargo into sub-carriers and returning the cargo to the providers once it returns to Earth. The contract also provides sustaining engineering for NASA carriers.

Following a detailed, integrated assessment, NASA selected target launch dates for the remaining eight space shuttle missions on the current manifest in 2009 and 2010. The manifest includes one flight to the Hubble Space Telescope, seven assembly flights to the International Space Station, and two station contingency flights, planned to be completed before the end of fiscal year 2010. The agency previously selected Oct. 8 and Nov. 10 as launch dates for Atlantis' STS-125 mission to service Hubble and Endeavour's STS-126 / ULF-2 mission to supply the space station and service both Solar Alpha Rotary Joints on the port and starboard end of its truss backbone that supports equipment and solar arrays.

NASA will hold a media briefing Wednesday, July 30, at 1 p.m. CDT, with the next resident crew of the International Space Station and an American spaceflight participant.

The briefing will originate from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and will be broadcast live on NASA Television. Questions will be taken from news media at participating NASA sites.

The briefing participants include:
- Expedition 18 Commander and NASA astronaut Michael Fincke
- Expedition 18 Flight Engineer and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov
- Expedition 18 Flight Engineer and NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus
- Expedition 18 Flight Engineer and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata