NASA Expects 200,000 at Landing : Bush Hails ‘Wonderful’ Shuttle Mission

Crewmen of the space shuttle Discovery took part in a very public conversation with the President of the United States on Thursday as they sped around the Earth, and they also got a little personal advice from the people they had left at home.

In a telephone call from the White House, President Bush congratulated the five-man crew “for this wonderful, wonderful mission.”

The President’s phone call was carried live on network television, but the astronauts also got messages from their wives in the daily printed instructions that are radioed to the shuttle from Mission Control in Houston.

“You look awesome,” Diane Coats told the Discovery’s commander, Navy Capt. Michael L. Coats.

“Hi hubcap,” Tandi Bagian greeted her husband, James, a physician-astronaut.

The President hailed the crew as “today’s pioneers” and invited the crew members to visit the White House after their return.

“The space program, especially space station Freedom, is an investment in our future,” the President said.

His reference to the space station was a little ironic. The only experiment that the astronauts have had much trouble with is a 51-foot-long heat radiator in the cargo bay. The radiator is being checked out by the crew to see if it could remove heat generated by electrical components aboard the space station. But the experiment failed because fluid in the pipe that is supposed to transfer the heat has bubbles in it, something no one on the ground had anticipated.

As the five-day mission nears an end, the crew began preliminary preparations for Saturday’s landing at Edwards Air Force Base. The landing is now set for 6:36 a.m. PST.

Viewing Site to Open

The East Shore viewing site on the base will be open to the public this morning, and vehicle passes are not required. But NASA officials expect 200,000 people to attend the event and said access to the site will be closed one hour before the landing. They urged the public to arrive at least three hours ahead of time due to heavy traffic on two-lane roads.

As warnings about congestion and rattlesnakes were being issued on the ground, the flight was going relatively smoothly. Pilot John E. Blaha spent part of the day Thursday checking out 32 fertilized chicken eggs carried aboard the shuttle as a student experiment.

“They all look in great shape,” he told a beaming John Vellinger, 22, at Mission Control. Vellinger proposed the experiment while still in high school. He hopes it will determine whether weightlessness has any effect on the development of an embryo.

The astronauts also took more photographs and continued to use the 70-millimeter IMAX camera to record environmental damage on Earth. Their movie, tentatively called “The Fragile Earth,” is due out in a year or so, the astronauts said and will be shown at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, among other places.

The shuttle crew created a spectacular cosmic snowstorm over Hawaii Thursday when they pumped out waste water as they sped over the islands, 187 miles above the ground. The water instantly turned to ice crystals, creating a dazzling display.