NASA (the United States space agency) revealed the dates it fixed for the last flights of the current shuttle fleet. The last flight was scheduled for 31 May, 2010, four months before the retirement of the whole fleet.

NASA announced that it set the dates of all the space shuttle launches through 2009 and 2010. The space agency has 10 missions remaining for the current fleet, which President George W. Bush ordered to retire by September 30, 2010. The schedule of the last flights was made public on Monday and will include five flights this year, five in 2009 and three in 2010.

During these last flights, the space shuttles will carry vital spare parts for the International Space Station (ISS) including communications equipment and shielding panels.

As announced, this year NASA will launch Atlantis' STS-125 mission to service Hubble on 8 October and Endeavour's STS-126 to the ISS on 10 November.

The year 2009 will kick off on 12 February with Discovery (mission STS-119 delivering final solar arrays to the ISS), continuing with Endeavour on 15 May (STS-127 the carrying of the final components of Japan's kibo lab), while Atlantis (STS-128) will launch on 30 July carrying science and storage racks for the station.

On 15 October, Discovery will embark on mission STS-129 which focuses on staging spare components outside the station. The last mission of the year will be STS-130 during which Endeavor will carry in space the 1.8-tonne "Cupola" - a "robotic control station with six windows around its sides and another in the center that provides a 360-degree view around the station".

"Astronauts are going to love it and they are going to spend every available minute they possibly can in there, just because the view will be so spectacular. It will also provide really good photography of the Earth," said Jim Flemming from Boeing, which worked on the early concept work on Cupola, BBC reported.

In 2010 NASA will carry out the fleet’s last three missions which are scheduled as it follows: 11 February (Atlantis, STS-131), 8 April (Discovery, STS-132) and 31 May (Endeavour, STS-133). During these missions NASA will work to carry to the station Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, maintenance and assembly hardware and "critical” spare components.

However, the dates are reportedly provisional and could change due to various reasons such as technical problems or unfavorable weather conditions.

Some Congress members said they want to add one more mission in which NASA will carry the $1.6-billion US Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS.

By the time the current fleet is retired, NASA said it hopes to have verified the substitute technology with a test flight of its Ares launch vehicle. The mission will be called Ares I-X, will be unmanned and will be just a trial mission with the goal of testing the key components.
After the trial mission, NASA will send the new Orion carrier and its crew to the Moon.

The closing of Kennedy Space Center will lead to a loss of about 3,000 to 4,000 jobs, NASA estimated, but the agency’s administrator Michael Griffin said as many as 3,000 positions will open up in the new exploration program. The jobs will be created to assemble and fly the new Ares rocket and Orion capsule to the ISS and eventually to the Moon.