David wrote:
2009. Now I can understand that there must be a bit of of a backlog of items
to be transported by the Shuttle, but why does it have to stay in storage
for so long?

Cupola was originally planned to be attached to Node 1 (Unity) and help with
final construction of station.

Now they have decided to mount it to Node3 which will be one of the last
modules to be added (if not the last). So cupola has to wait for Node 3 to be
sent up.

I have no idea what the advantage of putting the cupola on node3 vs unity is.

Cupola isn't big enough to justify its own flight, so it needs to be
manifested on the few flights that have spare space/capacity.