NASA had planed to launch its space shuttle ______ in September.

NASA says it will not send another shuttle this year to the International Space Station (ISS). It had hoped to launch Atlantis in September, but put that mission off last week until November. Now, the further flight delay will give technicians even more time to understand why a piece of hard insulation foam broke away from the external fuel tank during Discovery’s July launch and to fix the problem.
     It was such a chunk of foam that doomed Columbia and its seven-member crew by puncturing its wing during liftoff. NASA spent two-and-a half-years and millions of dollars to prevent another occurrence, and the July incident forced the agency to ground the shuttle fleet again until it could resolve the issue once and for all.
     As a result, NASA will return three external fuel tanks to the manufacturer for analysis and redesign. Agency human space flight chief William Gerstenmeier says this means a shuttle cannot lift off before March, but emphasizes that March is only a planning target.
     "We shouldn’t be thinking of the launch date as March. We put a planning target out there and now we’re going to do a detailed engineering assessment and analysis and start seeing if that makes sense. Then when a couple weeks have gone by and we’ve got enough intelligence together, then we can pick a launch date."
     On Wednesday, NASA was accused of rushing Discovery to launch in July, skipping safety improvements that led to the repeat foam shedding. The accusation came from seven members of a much larger group of experts who had overseen NASA’s shuttle safety modifications after the Columbia tragedy.