CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: NASA Sunday delayed the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour until May 8 at the earliest, after technical problems uncovered last week proved more complex than originally thought. Electrical failures in the power supply to a fuel-line heating unit caused engineers to scrub the what would have been the second-to-last shuttle flight ever just hours before liftoff Friday. A plan to try the launch again Monday was scratched once engineers realized the problem could take more time to fix. “We still have a lot of work and a lot of offroads that could take us one way or another,” Mike Moses, NASA launch integration manager, told reporters Sunday. The launch will be “not any earlier than the 8th,” and possibly even later, he said. “Just take that as a target for when we are going to start talking again about another launch date.” Endeavour is poised to carry a potent, multibillion dollar tool for searching the universe in the penultimate flight for NASA's 30-year program. After Endeavour returns from its 14-day mission and Atlantis launches for a final time in June, the iconic space shuttle program will close for good. That will leave Russia as the sole taxi for astronauts heading to and from the orbiting space lab until a new spaceship is built by a partnership between NASA and private companies, by 2015 at the earliest. Officials blamed electrical problems in a unit that would have prevented fuel from freezing in orbit for last week's scrubbed launch.
