system. The arm would have then aided in the day-to-day needs of the station and would have seen 10 years of service. In September 1994 the ERA System Requirements Review was completed. The completion of the review cleared the way to start full development of ERA. In early 1995 a Request of Quotation was released and six months later the DDT&E contract was signed between ESA and Fokker Space. The Preliminary Design Review for ERA was completed in 1996. Payload mass and clearance limitations resulted in ERA no longer launching with the Science Power Platform on a Proton Rocket; instead ERA was moved to a space shuttle launch. With the change to a shuttle launch, two major changes to the ERA design were made in 1997. The first being that the joints were altered to facilitate launch on the Space Shuttle. Secondly the ERA on-board computers were switched to being based on the ESA's Data Management System. That same year also saw evaluation and review of the Man Machine Interfaces for ERA start. The inclusion of ISS astronauts and cosmonauts along with experts led to several design improvements. Manufacturing and testing of ERA engineering models also started in 1997. The electrical interface model was shipped to Russia to verify electrical interfaces between the ERA systems and elements of the Russian segment of the ISS. 1998 saw several components being delivered both to Russia and ESA. Early that year the Geometric model was sent to Russia for fit-checks and configuration analysis. The first flight equipment was also delivered to Russia, that being the grapple fixture basepoints. In March of that year the Weightless Environment Test model "WET" underwent acceptance activities at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. In May 2000, all major components of the ERA were delivered to Fokker Space allowing for the start of the assembly, integration and test program at the flat-floor test facility. Construction of the ERA was finished in 2001. Originally planned to be launched in 2001 on a Space Shuttle, it was later delayed to 2002. Following following further delays and launch set-backs, the launch date was left uncertain following the hold on the Space Shuttle program due to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, as well as the cancelation of the Science Power Platform. Nauka In 2004, Roscosmos introduced the Multipurpose Laboratory Module Upgrade (MLM-U), also called Nauka, and proposed that the ERA could be installed,