CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The six Atlantis
shuttle astronauts who jump started construction of the International Space
Station (ISS) are happy to be home after a job well done.
Just hours
after returning
to Earth following a 12-day space trip, Atlantis
shuttle commander Brent Jett and his STS-115 crewmates said they left an
awe-inspiring sight in the form of a drastically
different ISS.
"It's left
me with a feeling of pride and awe," said STS-115
pilot Chris Ferguson, who guided Atlantis around the ISS after undocking
Sunday. "It was really quite a moment for me personally to see it, and to know
that we had the pleasure and the honor and the distinction to be a part of it."
Jett and
Ferguson deftly guided Atlantis to a predawn
landing here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 6:21 a.m. EDT (1021 GMT),
ending a 12-day mission that marked the first dedicated ISS
construction flight since late
2002.
Joining
Jett and Ferguson on their STS-115 mission - which delivered a hefty pair of $372
million trusses and expansive
solar arrays to the ISS - were mission specialists Joseph
Tanner, Daniel
Burbank, Heidemarie
Stefanyshyn-Piper and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Steven
MacLean.
"The
mission, from our standpoint, went off very well," said Jett, who told
reporters STS-115 was likely his last mission to actually fly in space. "I
would hope five years from now, we will have an assembled space station."
NASA's STS-115
mission returned the U.S. space agency to an operational mode of
spaceflight after two successful test
flights to recover from the 2003
Columbia accident. The mission came after four years of training for the
STS-115 astronauts, which Jett said seemed to be actually more challenging than
the spaceflight itself.
Despite
their stellar performance, NASA officials said Atlantis' STS-115 crew gave up
much when the astronauts decided to persevere through four years of delays and
training.
"This crew
made a choice to stay with this flight, NASA's ISS program manager Michael
Suffredini said during the STS-115 mission. "They chose to make a huge
sacrifice to stick with it."
Atlantis'
astronaut crew staged three
spacewalks outside the ISS which, despite their complexity, appeared to go relatively
smoothly.
"I know it
might have looked easy, it was not," said Tanner, a veteran spacewalker, adding
that many of the massive ISS components installed during STS-115 were flown and
activated for the first time. "What we did on those EVAs was not easy."
One major
asset to accomplish the intense STS-115 spacewalks was the support of the space
station's Expedition
13 crew of Pavel
Vinogradov, Jeffrey
Williams and Thomas
Reiter, the Atlantis astronauts said.
"Those guys
were phenomenal," Jett said of the Expedition 13 crew. "There was no way we
could have gotten back-to-back EVAs without them...we knew they were good, we
didn't know how good. We were impressed."
Ferguson and Stefanyshyn-Piper made their
first spaceflight during STS-115, with Stefanyshyn-Piper - a trained U.S. Navy
diver - also making her spacewalk debut.
"It's a
much better view than it is underneath a ship," Stefanyshyn-Piper said.
Ferguson said before landing that he and his
crew could use an extra day in orbit to relax and look out the window. But when
a few mystery
objects floating away from the orbiter prompted yet another round of heat
inspections - the crew's third set of their mission - with Atlantis' robotic
arm and a
landing delay, his wish came at a price.
"They were
looking out the window, but they weren't looking at the Earth," Jett joked.
"While it's
fun to operate the arm, it would have been nice to get at least a couple hours
off to look out the window," Ferguson said.
MacLean
became the second Canadian ever to walk in space during STS-115 and the first
ever from his country to actually wield the ISS arm built in his homeland. But
the most memorable moment, he said, will be during a spacewalk he shared with Burbank as both astronauts struggled to remove a stubborn bolt that could have thrown a
wrench in plans to deploy a new solar array.
"When we
got to that second bolt and it just wouldn't go at first and it was tight, I
thought, 'Oh man, I am not coming inside until that thing comes off,'" MacLean
said. "Plus, when you're on the end of the [Port 3/Port 4] truss like that,
you're splitting the Earth and space while you're doing it and it's a great
place to be."
"That could
have brought the mission to a halt for at least a day or two or more just to
figure out how to get that thing off of there," Burbank said of the bolt.
But with
the mission complete, and a stunning
success in NASA's view, Ferguson said he will focus his next few hours on
relearning how to function on Earth.
"You would
think that after a week and a half that your body wouldn't forget what gravity
is like," Ferguson said. "I think I've spent the last seven hours or so trying
to remember, and I'm getting there."
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