CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Space shuttle Discovery and its crew of six landed safely Monday, wrapping up a successful mission that put
NASA back in the space station construction business.
Discovery touched down on the
Kennedy Space Center runway around 9:14 a.m. EDT.
Mission Control had waited until almost the last minute before notifying the astronauts that the weather was good enough to come home.
A last-minute buildup of clouds shortly afterward prompted NASA to switch the shuttle's landing direction. Officials at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in eastern North Carolina also said they had been alerted for emergency landing duty as a precaution.
The shuttle, with commander Steven Lindsey and co-pilot Mark Kelly at the controls, plunged out of orbit an hour before touchdown with the firing of the braking rockets, and began the hourlong descent. The flight path had the spacecraft coming in from the south, swooping over the Pacific, Yucatan Peninsula, Gulf of Mexico and across Florida to cap a 5.3 million-mile journey that began on the Fourth of July.
NASA was certain that Discovery's heat shield was intact and capable of protecting the spaceship during the fiery re-entry.
Repeated inspections of the ship's thermal skin in orbit had given NASA confidence. Unlike on Discovery's flight a year ago, the external fuel tank shed little foam during liftoff. That flight was the shuttle's first after the Columbia disaster, when a chunk of falling hard foam doomed the shuttle in 2003.
Officials acknowledged re-entry was, along with the launch, the most dangerous phase of the mission and nothing could be taken for granted until Discovery was safely back home following its trip to the international space station. Toward that end, Discovery's astronauts and flight controllers kept close watch on a slightly leaking power unit that tested out fine a day earlier in orbit.
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