The shuttle Atlantis prepared for a new landing attempt yesterday at Florida's Cape Canaveral after bad weather forced it to stay aloft an extra day.
The shuttle had two windows of opportunity to return to Earth on Thursday, but rain and low clouds scuttled both attempts to land at the Kennedy Space Center.
"The rain shower and the [cloud] ceiling are going to keep us from making it in Florida today," a flight controller said from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Clouds below 2,400m block the pilot's vision as the shuttle aims for the landing strip without power, which pilots call a "dead stick" landing.
The shuttle plummets earthward 20 times faster than a commercial airliner, but unlike a jet, the pilot gets only one try for lack of power.
In all, the crew was to have five attempts to land yesterday: two in Florida, at 6:18pm GMT and 7:55pm GMT, and three at the Edwards Air Force Base in California, at 7:49pm GMT, 9:23pm GMT and 10:59pm GMT.
The shuttle could only have a small window of opportunity to land today with weather conditions set to worsen in Florida and also late yesterday in California.
NASA wants to land Atlantis by today as the shuttle's hydrogen batteries providing its electric power would have just one more day of life.
NASA prefers to land the shuttle in Florida as it costs nearly US$2 million to return it from California piggybacked atop a Boeing 747, and this would affect the schedule of future missions.
On Thursday the shuttle's cargo doors were closed in preparation for its descent from orbit, 13 days after blasting off on a mission to install new solar panels on the International Space Station (ISS).
Atlantis commander Rick Sturckow and pilot Lee Archambault waited for the green light to fire thrusters to slow down the orbiter, which reaches speeds of more than 26,000kph.
Atlantis undocked from the ISS on Tuesday after astronauts successfully installed a new 16-tonne truss segment expanding the orbiting laboratory with a new set of power-generating solar arrays that will track the sun.
The astronauts ventured out of the ISS on four spacewalks to install the new truss and fix a thermal blanket protecting the shuttle.
The mission was also marked by the unprecedented crash of Russian computers controlling the space station's orientation in orbit. The computers were fixed and passed a key test this week.
Atlantis, which launched on June 8, also brought a new crew member for the ISS, US astronaut Clayton Anderson, who joined two Russian cosmonauts and will stay aboard the orbiting research lab for four months.
Anderson replaced US colleague Sunita Williams, who set the record for the longest uninterrupted space flight by a woman, surpassing the 188-day and four-hour mark set by her compatriot Shannon Lucid in 1996.
NASA plans to launch at least 12 more shuttle missions, including three this year, as it races to finish building the US$100 billion ISS by 2010, when the US space agency retires its three remaining orbiters.
NASA considers the station a vital part of US ambitions to send a manned mission to Mars.
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