Supporting the vision for space with discrete event simulation

On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced a new vision for space exploration. This vision called for NASA to complete the assembly of the international space station by 2010 and retire the space shuttle immediately thereafter. A discrete event simulation (DES) based tool has been built to assess the viability of NASA accomplishing all of the space shuttle missions required to assemble the space station by the end of the decade. This paper describes this DES tool i.e. the manifest assessment simulation tool (MAST)