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Cloudy weather delays shuttle's return to Earth

After orbiting the Earth for nearly two weeks, astronauts aboard space shuttle Discovery were told to circle the planet for another day as bad weather in Florida forced NASA to delay yesterday's scheduled landing.

The astronauts had powered up their spacecraft and were awaiting word from Mission Control to fire their braking rockets and head for home when controllers announced early yesterday that low clouds over Cape Canaveral would postpone the landing.

"We've been working this pretty hard as I'm sure you can imagine from our silence down here," Mission Control radioed Discovery commander Eileen Collins. "We just can't get comfortable with the stability of the situation for this particular opportunity, so we are going to officially wave you off for 24 hours."

When cloud cover still threatened after the second of two landing opportunities, NASA officials rescheduled the landing for today. For the next attempt, they will consider alternate landing sites at Edwards Air Force Base in California and at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, in addition to Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

"There's no agony," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said from the landing strip. He noted that the decision to put off Discovery's return until today came from chief astronaut Kent Rominger, who was flying the shuttle training aircraft through the cloudy sky over Kennedy.

Griffin said that today, "We're going to land one way or another, one place or another, and all we're talking about is where."

Today's first attempt is planned for 5:07am local time, NASA said on its Web site.

Before the weather deteriorated, Discovery had been set to land at Florida's Kennedy Space Center before dawn yesterday.

Astronaut John Herrington, who was at the runway waiting, said: "It's better to be on the safe side."

Discovery's 14-day flight to the international space station may be the last one for a long while. NASA grounded the shuttle fleet after a slab of insulating foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during liftoff -- the very thing that doomed Columbia and was supposed to have been corrected.
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