Columbus Precursor Spacelab missions

The Columbus Precursor Spacelab missions perform the interlink between standard Spacelab missions as represented by the missions D1 and D2 and crewed Columbus utilization. These missions, which preliminarily provide for repetitive flight opportunities to the user community, shall prepare the space station era with respect to technical concepts, involvement of user- and engineering centres and modified operations. A core-payload for Spacelab mission E1 consisting of different multi user facilities and stand alone instruments has been roughly accommodated, which perform the basis for further iterations w.r.t. a balanced utilization of the onboard resources by experiments from different disciplines.