Weighing In : Space Shuttle Returns With a Cargo of Data on Weightlessness

The space shuttle Columbia descended from a pale blue sky and landed smoothly here Monday after 14 days in orbit, ending the shuttle program’s longest flight with a wealth of new data on weightlessness in humans.

Heralded by its distinctive double sonic boom, the shuttle touched down just before 7:06 a.m.--29 seconds ahead of schedule--on Runway 22 as an estimated 35,000 spectators watched.

Columbia’s seven crew members were rushed from the spacecraft on stretchers for new tests at a base medical lab before their bodies had time to readapt to Earth’s gravity.

The touchdown marked the last scheduled shuttle landing at Edwards until 1995. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration saves $1 million per mission by landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the shuttle’s launch site. After landing at Edwards, the spacecraft is piggy-backed on a modified Boeing 747 jet and flown back to Florida.

During the flight, crew members pedaled bicycles, drew blood samples, dissected laboratory rats and performed other tests in a self-contained space clinic designed to provide new clues on how harmful effects of weightlessness can be counteracted during long space voyages.

“It’s the best mission we’ve ever flown,” said Dr. Frank Sulzman, NASA’s program scientist for the mission, at a post-flight news conference. “We got everything we wanted, plus some things we didn’t expect. . . . We did some really historic studies on the heart, lungs and blood.”

The flight was the 58th since the shuttle program’s 1981 inception and the 15th for Columbia. The shuttle orbited the Earth 224 times, traveling 5,840,560 miles at more than 17,000 m.p.h.

After zooming over the California coast just south of Monterey, the spacecraft banked hard above Edwards, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and dropped toward the runway, its nose scorched by intense heat generated by its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA shuttle director Tom Utsman said some protective thermal tiles on at least one of the vehicle’s engines appeared to have torn. But he said it was not a problem that threatened the mission’s safety.

Columbia’s astronauts conducted more than 125 tests intended to help solve such medical riddles as why muscles weaken, bones soften and red blood-cell production drops during lengthy space journeys.

Times correspondent Sharon Moeser contributed to this story