Shuttle Delays Endanger Space Station.

Like many home-improvement projects on Earth, NASA's most ambitious building effort in space languishes half-done. Now new delays, combined with the space shuttle's looming retirement, are raising worries about whether it can be finished at all. [...]

"It's certain" that the shuttle won't be able to pull off all 13 flights before late 2010, says Vincent Sabathier, a former European Space Agency official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's an aging system. … And delays are the nature of the game in space launches."

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