Friday, September 11th 2009, 10:21 PM
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - The space shuttle Discovery touched down safely on a landing strip in California’s Mojave Desert Friday at the end of a 14-day resupply mission to the International Space Station.
NASA diverted the spaceship to Edwards Air Force Base after waiting in vain for two days for rain and clouds to clear over the shuttle’s home base in Florida.
The shuttle landed at 8:53 p.m. EDT Friday .
“Welcome home Discovery, congratulations on an extremely successful mission,” astronaut Eric Boe radioed to the crew as Discovery came to a stop.
Flight directors had tried Thursday and Friday to bring Discovery back to Florida.
But rain and thunderstorms near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center stymied NASA’s original landing plans, prompting flight directors to switch to the backup site on the other side of the country, where skies were clear.
After 219 orbits around Earth, Discovery plunged back through the atmosphere, soaring northeast over the Pacific Ocean toward Southern California.
Appearing initially over the northeastern horizon as a white speck glinting in the fading sunlight, Discovery descended quickly to the base’s main landing strip, touching down with a puff of smoke as the rear wheels made contact with the runway at a speed of 250 miles per hour .
Double sonic booms earlier thundered through the sky as the shuttle dipped below the speed of sound for the first time since blasting off on Aug. 28 one minute before midnight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on NASA’s 128th space shuttle mission.
Commander Rick Sturckow circled Discovery down over the California desert, burning off speed before nose-diving the 100-tonship to the concrete landing strip to complete a 5.7-million mile journey.
NEW CREWMEMBER
Sturckow, pilot Kevin Ford, flight engineer Jose Hernandez, spacewalkers Danny Olivas and Christer Fuglesang, and astronaut Pat Forrester flew back to Earth with a new crewmember, returning space station flight engineer Tim Kopra, who had been in orbit at the station for two months.
Kopra’s replacement, Nicole Stott, will remain on the space station until NASA returns to the outpost in November.
She was the last station crewmember to catch a ride to the outpost on the shuttle and will be the last NASA astronaut to fly home on one as well.
NASA is turning over crew transport to the station to Russia, at a cost of about $50 million per seat, as it begins phasing out the shuttle. The space agency is also considering hiring U.S. commercial firms to ferry its astronauts.
During its latest mission, Discovery carried more than 7.5 tons of food, laboratory equipment, science experiments, spare parts, a new treadmill and crew quarters for the space station.
The space outpost is a $100 billion project involving 16 nations, which is nearing completion after more than a decade of construction.
Olivas, Fuglesang — a Swedish astronaut with the European Space Agency — and Stott made three spacewalks to replace a refrigerator-sized tank of ammonia coolant and prepare the station for its final connecting hub.
NASA has six flights remaining to finish outfitting the station. It then plans to retire the shuttles and move on with development of a capsule and rocket that could ferry crews to the moon.
Those plans may change as President Barack Obama considers the results of a study that has determined NASA’s lunar ambitions exceed its budget by about $3 billion a year.
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