NASA gave the green light Wednesday for the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, officially setting the mission clock on its journey to the International Space Station for May 14 at 2:20 pm (1820 GMT).
The decision from top managers at the US space agency came at the end of a flight readiness review at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, NASA said in a statement.
Weather permitting, the mission will launch the shuttle on a 12-day trip to the ISS to deliver an integrated cargo carrier and a Russian-built mini research module.
NASA late last month pushed back to November the launch of the shuttle Endeavour, one of the other three remaining shuttle missions, to modify an experiment module that is to be attached to the orbiting outpost.
It had been scheduled to lift off July 29 but will now launch "no earlier than mid-November 2010" so that scientists can upgrade a magnet in the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer program to a longer-lasting device.
The Endeavour's rescheduling did not affect the launch of Atlantis, and replaces shuttle Discovery — set for a September 16 mission — as the last ever shuttle launch.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is mothballing its shuttle program this year.
Once the three shuttles are retired, the United States will rely on Russia to take astronauts to the station aboard three-seater Soyuz spacecraft until a new fleet of commercial space taxis is operational.
A successor craft is scheduled to take off no earlier than 2015.
By the time the final three missions are complete, the space shuttles — characterized by NASA as the most advanced machines ever built — will have flown 134 missions into orbit.
The ISS, a joint project involving 16 countries, has cost around 100 billion dollars, mostly funded by the United States.
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