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<b>Technical challenges push the launch of the ATV to 2007</b><br /><br /><i>7 November 2005</i><br />Today, about 98 percent of the hardware for Jules Verne, Europe’s first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) spaceship, considered to be the most complex space vehicle ever developed in Europe, is already assembled and almost ready to fly.<br /> <br />"Obviously we cannot launch unless we have everything 100 percent ready and fully tested", said John Ellwood, ESA’s ATV Project Manager. "The extensive three-year test campaign on such a complicated programme -- with its unavoidable problems and delays -- will push us back by almost one year, to 2007." <br />Since summer 2004, the Jules Verne spaceship has been progressively tested and assembled at ESA's research and technology centre, ESTEC, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Hundreds of integration operations, hardware checks and functional tests of the 19.7-tonne vessel have been achieved successfully, at times requiring new technical solutions, minor changes and a lot of fine-tuning. <br /><br />The technical complexity of this ESA programme, which also involves close cooperation with NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos and several Russian aerospace companies, had already caused a two-year delay of the inaugural launch, to 2006. But some hardware failures occurred earlier this year and have impacted the campaign schedule with a snowball effect, now delaying the launch to 2007. <br /><br />Full Story <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#800080">"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring" - <strong>Chuck Palahniuk</strong>.</font> </div>