Discovery and its crew of seven glided safely back to Earth yesterday, ending a riveting, at times agonizing, 14-day test of space shuttle safety that was shadowed by the ghosts of Columbia.
Discovery swooped through the darkness of the Mojave Desert and landed on the Edwards runway at 1211 GMT, well before sunrise. It marked the conclusion of the first shuttle re-entry since Columbia's tragic return.
The detour to California came after thunderstorms in Cape Canaveral, Florida, prevented the shuttle from returning to its home base.
PHOTO: AP
"Congratulations on a truly spectacular test flight," Mission Control said once Discovery came to a stop. "Welcome home, friends."
"We're happy to be back and we congratulate the whole team for a job well done," Commander Eileen Collins replied.
The inherently dangerous ride down through the atmosphere -- more anxiety-ridden than normal because of what happened to Columbia two-and-a-half years ago -- appeared to go smoothly. No problems were immediately reported by Mission Control.
Held up a day by bad weather in Florida, the shuttle soared across the Pacific and over Southern California, passing just north of Los Angeles on its way to Edwards.
NASA adjusted the flight path in order to skirt Los Angeles because of new public safety considerations in the wake of the Columbia disaster, which rained debris onto Texas and Louisiana.
Discovery's journey, which began with a liftoff on July 26, spanned 219 orbits of Earth and 9.33 million km.
The switch to the opposite coast was a big disappointment for the astronauts' families, who had been waiting to greet their loved ones in Cape Canaveral. Their reunion was put on hold until today, when they all planned to meet in Houston.
NASA's top officials also had gathered at Cape Canaveral to welcome the crew home.
"There's nothing more that I would love to see than it here so everybody here could be a part of this. But it's not going to be," said shuttle program manager Bill Parsons. "I want it to be safe, wherever the safest place is to go."
NASA called it a test flight and it was -- in an alarming way no one anticipated. A potentially deadly 0.45kg chunk of foam insulation came off the redesigned fuel tank during liftoff, missing Discovery but demonstrating that the space agency had not resolved the very problem that doomed Columbia.
The foam loss prompted NASA to ground future shuttle flights.
Shuttle managers freely acknowledged the mistake, while stressing that the inspection, photography and other shuttle data-gathering systems put in place for this flight worked exceedingly well. What's more, no severe damage was detected on Discovery while it was in orbit.
A torn thermal blanket under a cockpit window was left as is, after engineers decided it posed little risk as re-entry shrapnel.
Two pieces of filler material dangling from Discovery's belly, however, were removed by a spacewalking astronaut last week, for fear they could lead to a repeat of the Columbia tragedy. The fabric strips slipped out of the narrow gaps between thermal tiles for reasons unknown.
NASA officials said a space shuttle will not fly again until the foam problem is solved and engineers understand why the two so-called gap fillers came loose.
"It's going to be a new beginning for the space shuttle program," said Bill Readdy, NASA's spaceflight chief, from the Cape Canaveral landing strip. "The approach that we've taken has to do with a very methodical series of flight tests. It's exactly the right approach."
"This was certainly the most documented flight in shuttle history," Readdy added.
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