Shuttle landing caps a ‘great mission’

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The space shuttle Discovery dodged clouds to make a textbook touchdown here Monday, capping a 13-day mission that set the stage for resuming construction of the international space station.

Two bone-rattling sonic booms heralded the shuttle's arrival over Florida, and only a couple of minutes later, Discovery plunged to its landing at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 9:14 a.m. ET.

"Welcome back, Discovery, and congratulations on a great mission," spacecraft communicator Steve Frick told the crew.

"It was a great mission, a really great mission," Discovery commander Steve Lindsey replied. "Enjoyed the entry and the landing."

The flight ranked as one of NASA's safest ever, with almost none of the worrisome fuel-tank foam loss that marked last year's flight of Discovery. In fact, NASA said Discovery's 5.3 million-mile (8.5 million-kilometer) flight was nearly flawless.

"This is as good a mission as we've ever flown," NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told reporters after the landing.

Launch manager Mike Leinbach said the successful flight also helped exorcise the demons raised by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew three and a half years ago — the last time a space shuttle attempted to land in Florida.

"Columbia's landing day was a horrible day," he said. "Today was a great day."

Lindsey said he preferred not to think of the flight as the end of a tragic chapter in space history.

"I think it's more like a beginning of another phase, which is space station assembly and then on to exploration," he told reporters here. "I don't think we ever want to put Columbia behind us. I think we need to remember the lessons learned from Columbia. We obviously have learned the technical lessons of Columbia. We are still learning them, we will continue to learn them. But more importantly, we have learned the cultural, organizational lessons of Columbia — and that's the one thing that we don't ever want to forget."

Weather worries
NASA had declared Discovery safe for landing after days of agonizing over the shuttle's heat shield and a small leak in one of the onboard power units. However, the verdict on Monday's weather went to almost the last possible minute.

Forecasters were watching a band of rain clouds north of the shuttle's landing strip here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, but concluded that the rain would stay far enough away and gave their irreversible go-ahead for the landing attempt.

Discovery slowed down from a velocity 25 times the speed of sound — in the process, heating the shuttle's protective skin to temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 degrees Celsius). The flight path took the shuttle over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, west of Cuba and then across Florida itself.

Lindsey said the moon could be sighted through the glow of superheated gases as Discovery passed through the atmosphere. "It was beautiful," he said later. "We could see the bright orange glow above, and I could see the earth moving below, and it was just spectacular."

The only problem on the way down was a harmless glitch involving one of the shuttle's air data probes. But a stray rain cloud cropped up within NASA exclusion zone during the descent, prompting controllers to shift Discovery's final approach from the south end of Kennedy Space Center's 15,000-foot-long (4.6-kilometer-long) runway to the north end. Lindsey also had to fly the shuttle through a cloud bank before breaking out into open sky.

In light of those circumstances, lead flight director Steve Stich gave Lindsey "a perfect 10" for the landing.

Discovery's touchdown represented the first shuttle landing in Florida since December 2002. Columbia broke up over Texas on its way to a Florida landing in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard and forcing a 2½-year-long suspension of flights. Last August, Discovery's first post-Columbia flight ended in California because of unacceptable weather in Florida.

Marking a transition
After a landing-strip inspection of the shuttle, Lindsey said on NASA TV that his mission marked a transition between the Columbia tragedy and the final push to finish construction of the international space station by 2010.

"We had two major objectives on this flight," Lindsey said. "The first one was to complete the return-to-flight test objectives ... and the second one was to get us back to space station assembly. And I think we accomplished both those objectives."

He voiced praise for his "nearly perfect" crew as well as for NASA workers on the ground. "The vehicle was clean all the way through the flight," he said. "We had very, very few problems."

Administrator Griffin agreed that Discovery was "the cleanest vehicle we've ever seen" — virtually free of the "dings" to shuttle tiles that are usually seen at the end of a shuttle flight. At the same time, he warned against complacency.

"We learned a lot from this flight, and that's all to the good," he said. "But we need to not be overconfident. We need to not get ahead of ourselves. We need to stick with the numbers and see what they tell us as we get ready to go do the next flight."

MORE FROM HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT

Human Spaceflight Section Front

Shuttle lifts off at last after five delays Astronaut taking Twitter to space en Español President faces a Kennedy decision on space Aldrin thinks U.S. should set its sights on Mars Crew gears up for space construction marathon Shuttle skipper tweeting away Billionaire plans space artistry Space travel can be a headache. Literally. One happy (crowded) family in orbit No more shuttles, no in-space fixes Human Spaceflight Section Front   Add Human Spaceflight headlines to your news reader: