studied before committing to any particular Phase 2 design. During 1986 and 1987, various other studies were carried out on the future of the U.S. space program; the results of these often impacted the Space Station, and their recommendations were folded into the revised baseline as necessary. One of the results of these was to baseline the Station program as requiring five shuttle flights a year for operations and logistics, rotating four crew at a time with the aim of extending individual stay times to 180 days. Freedom (1988) to Alpha (1993) NASA signed final ten-year contracts for developing the Space Station in September 1988, and the project was finally moving into the hardware fabrication phase. The Space Station Freedom design was slightly modified in late 1989 after the program's Fiscal 1990 budget again was reduced — from $2.05 billion to $1.75 billion — when the design was found to be 23% overweight and over budget, too complicated to assemble, and providing little power for its users. The 1990 Space Exploration Initiative called for the construction of the Space Station Freedom. Congress consequently demanded yet another redesign in October 1990, and requested further cost reductions after the fiscal 1991 budget was cut from $2.5 billion to $1.9 billion. NASA unveiled its new space station design in March 1991. Repeated budget cuts had forced a postponement of the first launch by a year, to March 1995. The Station would be permanently crewed from June 1997 onwards, and completed in February 1998. In 1993, after more calls for the station to be redesigned again to reduce costs and include more international involvement, the option that became known as Space Station 'Alpha' was chosen (from three competing concepts), using 75 percent of the hardware designs originally intended for the Freedom program. Cost escalation of the project and financial difficulties in Russia led to a briefing between NASA and NPO Energia on Mir-2 that same year, resulting in an option known briefly as the Russian Alpha (RAlpha). In late 1993, Freedom, Mir-2, and the European and Japanese modules were incorporated into a single International Space Station Alpha (ISSA), with Alpha dropped from the name internally by early 1995. In July 1995, the International Space Station Authorization Act of 1995 House report to U.S.Congress was released and the names Freedom, Alpha, and ISSA were no more. By this time, the hardware meant for Space Station