CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. - The seven astronauts of NASA's shuttle Atlantis were glad to
be home Wednesday after a successful space station construction mission that
ended with a smooth glide back to Earth.
Shuttle
commander Stephen Frick and his STS-122 crew celebrated their 13-day flight,
which delivered the European-built
Columbus laboratory and a new crewmember to the International Space Station
(ISS).
"We're really
happy to be home today," Frick told reporters here at NASA's Kennedy Space
Center. "It's been a long mission, a really busy mission. But it's been a
tremendous experience."
With Frick
at the controls, Atlantis swooped
out of the Florida sky to land at 9:07 a.m. EST (1407 GMT) and end the
first of up to six NASA shuttle flights planned for this year. Shuttle pilot
Alan Poindexter, mission specialists Leland Melvin, Rex Walheim, Stanley Love,
Dan Tani and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Hans Schlegel of Germany comprised the rest of the crew.
"Atlantis
was in super shape and took care of us," said Poindexter, a first-time
spaceflyer who took the shuttle's controls Monday and flew a victory lap around
the ISS. "We're glad she's safely back here."
Missing
among the STS-122 crew was French astronaut
Leopold Eyharts, who launched aboard Atlantis Feb. 7, but stayed behind on
the space station to continue the commission of the ESA's 1.4 billion euro ($2 billion) Columbus module.
Eyharts replaced Tani, a U.S. astronaut who returned to Earth today after four
months in space.
"I was amazed...he
looked better than I did," Frick said of Tani, who has spent the last 120 days
living in weightlessness aboard the ISS. "He's doing great."
Schlegel, who
sat out one the STS-122 crew's three spacewalks due an illness but recovered in
time to for the mission's second excursion, said the spaceflight marked a
milestone for Europe.
"From now
on, Europe has its presence in space," Schlegel said, adding that the mission
was a experience of a lifetime. "For ESA, for all of Europe, it's the beginning
of the human spaceflight."
Love added
that the spaceflight added the first new piece of the space station dedicated
purely to scientific research.
"One of the
things the station hasn't been able to do yet as much as we had wanted is
science," said Love, who helped install the lab and add exterior experiments
during two spacewalks. "It's a privilege to me to be part of this wonderful
team that's put a dedicated science laboratory on station and put some new instruments
on the outside of it to do the work that station was intended for."
Love's
spacewalking partner, veteran spaceflyer Rex Walheim, said he relished the
chance to return to the ISS, which he last visited during a 2002 shuttle flight.
"It did
feel great to be back," said Walheim, who got a chance to revisit the station trusswork
that he helped install on his earlier flight during the STS-122 spacewalks. "It's
neat to see it expanding because it is bigger, there's no question about it."
But for
Melvin, who like Poindexter and Love completed his first spaceflight, the mission was a model for teamwork. And when it comes to teamwork,
Melvin — a former draft pick for the NFL's Detroit Lions — would know.
"The
international flavor of this team, all the people working together to put this Columbus
module in space has just been breathtaking," Melvin said. "Everyone working together
is just a benefit to humankind, and something that's going to carry us back to
the moon and Mars and beyond."
In addition to clearing the way for future space station construction, Atlantis'
successful landing cleared the way for the U.S.
military's plans to shoot
down an ailing spy satellite. The U.S. Navy was waiting for Atlantis'
return before pressing ahead with plans to destroy the bus-sized object
before it enters the Earth's atmosphere to prevent a half-ton load of toxic
rocket fuel from endangering people on the ground.
advertisement
