Quote Originally Posted by walterick
Well, I can't claim to be educated about the workings of NASA.


I may be way off base here, but my first thought in reading your post Steve is that there were pressures going on under the surface pushing the launch to occur.
The only pressures to get the launch to occur is to finish the ISS before 2010, plain and simple. NASA has some contractual agreements with its International Partners to have their modules flown to the Station in the near future. The longer it takes to get back to regular Shuttle flights, the fewer flights there will be. That said, the ISS assembly sequence has been changed more times than you can count. It is a very robust design, so if there are fewer flights, things can be dropped and rearranged to accomodate the few Shuttles. That's why NASA isn't being pushed to fly before things are safe. There is plenty of flexibility in the ISS design and assembly sequence.