International Space Station program out of 28 flights have not been to the ISS, and only the planned Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission in 2009 will not be ISS-related out of 13 planned missions until the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2010). The Space Shuttle was retired from service upon the conclusion of Atlantis' final flight on July 21, 2011. NASA was reliant even at the time on some of the resupply contracts being fielded out to Soyuz and Progress and the other unmanned tugs, but it had launched a few years earlier into a program of aggressive development of commercial US
Space Shuttle preserve their consumables. The SSPTS was first used successfully on STS-118. Orbiter (for "Endeavour", OV-105) External tank (for SLWT) Solid Rocket Boosters System Stack All Space Shuttle missions were launched from Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The weather criteria used for launch included, but were not limited to: precipitation, temperatures, cloud cover, lightning forecast, wind, and humidity. The Shuttle was not launched under conditions where it could have been struck by lightning. Aircraft are often struck by lightning with no adverse effects because the electricity of the strike is dissipated through its conductive structure and the aircraft is not electrically grounded.