Discovery touches down after 14-day mission

The most exhaustive test flight in the space shuttle fleet's 24-year history ended Tuesday with the shuttle Discovery's pre-dawn touchdown in California. Now that the crew is back safely, the shuttle faces an uncertain future.

After 14 days, 219 Earth orbits and 5.8 million miles in space, Discovery landed safely at 8:11:22 a.m. ET at Edwards Air Force Base. "Discovery is home," the NASA TV commentator announced.

"Congratulations on a truly spectacular test flight," astronaut Ken Ham at Mission Control radioed to the crew as the shuttle stopped on the runway. “Welcome home, friends.

"We're happy to be back," replied commander Eileen Collins, who piloted the 100-ton spacecraft to its landing. "We congratulate the whole team on a job well done."

The mission exposed how vulnerable the shuttle fleet remains, despite a tremendous amount of money and effort invested in the first U.S. manned space mission in the 2 1/2 years since the Columbia tragedy.

Shortly after liftoff July 26, a 1-pound chunk of foam insulation fell from the fuel tank — the very thing that doomed Columbia — but it missed Discovery. Still, NASA grounded all shuttle flights until engineers fix the problem.

“We’re going to try as hard as we can to get back in space this year,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said at a post-landing news conference. “But we’re not going to go until we’re ready to go.”

Shuttle managers freely acknowledged the foam mistake, while stressing that the inspection, photography and other shuttle data-gathering systems put in place for this flight worked well. What’s more, NASA officials said no severe damage was detected on Discovery while it was in orbit.

“I hope this shows people that we’re coming back,” NASA spaceflight chief Bill Readdy said from Cape Canaveral, Fla. “We’ve got some more work to do. We know what we need to do and we’ll do it.”

‘We had a fantastic mission’
Commander Collins and the other members of Discovery's crew — Jim Kelly, Steve Robinson, Soichi Noguchi, Andy Thomas, Wendy Lawrence and Charlie Camarda — took a post-landing inspection tour around Discovery as it sat on the runway at Edwards.

"We have had a fantastic mission," Collins said, standing on the tarmac in front of the shuttle. "We are so glad to be able to come back and say it was successful." She noted that the crew had been anxious to inspect Discovery for damage and was pleased that it was in such good shape.

"It's absolutely fantastic to be back here to the planet Earth," Collins said at a news conference a few hours later. "We had a great mission. We got a few more days than we expected and we used them wisely," she said.

The crew's families, along with top NASA officials, had been awaiting the shuttle's return to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where Discovery had launched on July 26. Rain and thunderstorms in Florida forced the shuttle to land in California instead, however.

The Columbia disaster weighed heavily on everyone’s minds as the shuttle made its descent to Earth. Co-pilot James Kelly said he was “honestly hoping that we’d make it farther than they did. And I wished that they had made it all the way home.”

Unlike previous Edwards landings, in which throngs of spectators gathered for a shuttle return, the public was barred from viewing Discovery due to increased security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I was pretty anxious all day,” flight director LeRoy Cain said at a post-landing news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He said there were a couple of anomalies during re-entry but labeled them “insignificant.”

“Today we honored the Columbia crew. We brought Discovery home safely,” shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said. “It’s a great day.”

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