This story was updated at 11:09 a.m. EDT.
The space shuttle Discovery returned
to its home spaceport Sunday, landing at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC)
after a weekend flight across the country.
A modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet
ferried Discovery to KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility
at the orbiter's Cape Canaveral, Florida home, touching down at about 9:58 a.m.
EDT (1358 GMT) after a 2.5-hour flight from Barksdale Air Force Base in
Louisiana.
"This is a welcome sight for Kennedy
Space Center employees to see the vehicle back in town," NASA commentator Bruce
Buckingham said during the landing.
Discovery was slated to touchdown at
KSC Saturday
after a two-day flight
from Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert, but weather concerns
prompted shuttle officials to postpone the trip, NASA officials said. NASA
orbiters cannot fly through rain, which can damage the spacecraft, they added.
Discovery's Florida return is the
last leg of a 5.8-million-mile (9.3-million-kilometer) spaceflight that began
with launch on July 26.
After leaving Edwards Air Force Base on Friday, Discovery and its carrier
aircraft stopped briefly at Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma to refuel before
heading to Barksdale. The cross-country move cost about $1 million, NASA
officials have said.
After a 14-day spaceflight to the
International Space Station (ISS), where the shuttle's STS-114 astronaut crew
delivered vital supplies and tested new safety tools and procedures, Discovery
landed back on Earth on Aug. 9 at Edwards. Poor weather conditions prevented
several landing opportunities at KSC.
"We weren't able to bring their ship back to
them," STS-114 mission specialist Stephen Robinson said just after returning to
Earth, adding that he intended to be there when Discovery made it home.
Indeed, Robinson was among the engineers
and NASA officials who welcomed Discovery back to KSC, NASA officials told SPACE.com.
Discovery's successful spaceflight
marked NASA's first shuttle mission since the 2003 loss of seven astronauts aboard
the Columbia obiter, which broke apart during reentry. A piece of foam
insulation fell from Columbia's external tank during launch and pierced its heat
shield along its left wing, leaving it vulnerable to the extreme heat of
reentry, investigators found.
Discovery's flight was marred by a foam
shedding problem similar to that which doomed Columbia and its STS-107
astronaut crew, though the orbiter returned to Earth safely with a healthy heat
shield. NASA officials vowed to solve the foam problem before launching another
shuttle mission, but are targeting
March 2006 as the earliest an orbiter could fly.
Shuttle workers at NASA's
Edwards-based Dryden Flight Research Center spent 10 days preparing Discovery
for its cross-country trip. Despite delays
due to severe weather and a small glitch attaching a protective cone over the
shuttle's engines, the orbiter was installed atop its 747 mothership
using NASA's Mate-Demate Device.
Shuttle engineers are now working
with a similar device at KSC's landing facility to
pry Discovery off its carrier plane. The shuttle will then be towed to its
hangar, known as an Orbiter Processing Facility, where engineers will prepare
it for NASA's next shuttle mission.
Discovery will fly NASA's second
return to flight mission, STS-121, now set to launch no earlier than March, 4,
2006. The mission was previously set to fly aboard the Atlantis orbiter, which
is also set to fly the next major ISS construction flight. NASA officials
switched STS-121 to Discovery last week to ease that schedule.
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