Shuttle safely on the ground
NY Times
has the story
Shuttle Lands, Safely Ending First Mission Since Columbia
The space shuttle Discovery glided back to Earth to a pre-dawn landing here in the Mojave desert today, nearly 14 days after its 5.8-million-mile journey began.
Discovery swooped through the darkness of the Mojave Desert and landed on the Edwards runway at 5:11 a.m. PDT, well before sunrise.
It was the first shuttle mission since the loss of the Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts in February 2003, which plunged the space agency into what Michael Griffin, NASA's administrator, has called the "depths of despair."
Discovery's mission, on paper, was straightforward: it involved resupplying the International Space Station and testing new technologies and techniques for detecting, measuring and repairing damage from launch debris.
But at the core, the mission of Discovery was to get the United States back in the business of launching humans into space.
NASA administrators were ecstatic about the successful return into space."If you want to know how I feel, I feel fantastic," the program manager, Bill Parsons, said at a post-landing news conference. "This is a wildly successful mission in so many ways."
The landing was originally planned for the shuttles' home, Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But unpredictable weather along the Space Coast led mission managers to "wave off" four Florida landing opportunities in two days, and to finally call for a change of plans.
Good news! I was worried when I saw the images of the tiles falling off in launch and the space-walk to repair the underlayment.
Posted by DaveH at August 9, 2005 7:18 AM