Shuttle Lands Safely

The space shuttle Discovery today landed safely at the Edwards air force base in California to complete the first shuttle mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

The shuttle broke through the Earth's atmosphere at 1,700 miles an hour and was piloted to ground through the night sky by Commander Eileen Collins, bang on schedule at 1.12pm (BST).

"Congratulations on a truly spectacular test flight," astronaut Ken Ham, at Mission Control in Houston, told the Discovery crew as the shuttle stopped on the runway. "Welcome home friends."

"We're happy to be back in, we congratulate the whole team for a job well done," Cmdr Collins told Mission Control.

Discovery had been due to arrive three hours earlier at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, but bad weather over the east coast saw flight controllers direct it to the other side of the United States. The landing had already been postponed from yesterday because of the weather.

Nasa will now spend about $1m (£560,000) on returning the shuttle from California to Florida, piggybacking on a Boeing 747, where its launches take place. The touchdown on runway 22 at Edwards occurred about 53 minutes before dawn local time.

The astronaut's families will have to wait until tomorrow to see their loved ones. Their reunion was put on hold after the decision to switch to the opposite coast this morning.

The shuttle had six opportunities to land today: 10.08 BST and 11.43 BST in Florida, followed by 13.12 BST and 14.47 BST at the Edwards Air Force base.

Flight controllers had also been considering landing at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico if the weather did not improve. The landing slots there were 11.39 BST and 13.13 BST.

Mission Control reported no problems as the shuttle plunged through the atmosphere over the Pacific and began enduring the period of maximum heating, about 20 minutes before touchdown.

The shuttle had been following a course over the Pacific and into southern California. Nasa officials had said they would adjust the flight path so the shuttle skirted Los Angeles, in line with the agency's new public safety considerations in the wake of the Columbia accident.

The Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere two and half years ago, killing all seven astronauts on board.

But Discovery's launch and flight to the international space station could be the last for a long time.

Nasa grounded the shuttle fleet after a chunk of insulating foam weighing nearly 400g (1lb) broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during its liftoff on July 26 - the very thing that doomed Columbia and was supposed to have been corrected.

Unlike Columbia, Discovery narrowly missed being hit by the chunk of foam. Then astronaut Stephen Robinson made the first-ever orbital repair, gently pulling two strips of thermal tile "grout" away from the shuttle's heat shield.

Nasa officials said a space shuttle would not fly again until the foam problem was solved and engineers understood why the two so-called gap fillers came loose.

"It's going to be a new beginning for the space shuttle programme," Nasa's spaceflight chief, Bill Readdy, said 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," he added.

Discovery spent nine days hitched to the space station, where astronauts restocked the orbiting lab and removed broken equipment and rubbish, one of the main goals of the mission.

Another day was added to the mission when Nasa grounded its fleet so astronauts could do additional work on the station. Discovery was the first shuttle to visit the orbiting outpost since 2002.