Shuttle Schedule Adds Retrieval of Space Station

NASA revised its schedule of space shuttle flights and cargoes Tuesday, adding a mission that will retrieve a bus-size experimental station left in space in 1984 for what was to have been a one-year stay.

The new schedule does not change the date of the much-delayed first post-Challenger flight, now set for Aug. 4 with the launching of Discovery. There have been no American manned missions in space since Challenger exploded as it lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, killing the seven crew members.

A second shuttle flight this year, with an all-military crew, is scheduled on Atlantis for Oct. 27. It will carry two military communications satellites. The third flight, Discovery again, will be Jan. 19, 1989, and the fourth, using Columbia, will be March 2 on a Defense Department mission to launch a reconnaissance satellite.

Revisions in the shuttle schedule for early next year will enable NASA to orbit a pair of huge communications satellites earlier than planned. They will be needed in June, 1989, when the $1-billion Hubble Space Telescope is launched from a shuttle.

The orbit of the 11-ton Long Duration Exposure Facility, which gauged the effects of space’s hostile environment on 13 million seeds, metal coatings and surfaces, is decaying and there are fears that it will crash through the atmosphere and burn by mid-1990 if not recaptured. It was deployed by astronauts in April, 1984.

The structure is scheduled to be retrieved by the shuttle Columbia during a July 13, 1989, flight, after the crew launches a government communications satellite. A scientific project scheduled for that flight was moved to another date.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s schedule calls also for six small and medium-size expendable rockets to be launched this year, four in 1989 and seven in 1990.