Weather May Snarl Shuttle Landing Plans

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery packed Thursday to come home after a mission that made history with its U.S.-Russian partnership.

Bad weather threatened to disrupt NASA’s landing plans. Forecasters were calling for possible rain, low clouds and high winds at the Kennedy Space Center, any one of which could prevent the shuttle from landing there as scheduled at 9:44 a.m. PST today.

Officials were considering sending Discovery to Edwards Air Force Base in California or keeping the shuttle up an extra day.

Discovery’s five astronauts and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian to fly on a U.S. shuttle, have been in orbit since Feb. 3., working inside Spacehab, the small commercial laboratory in the cargo bay.

But the crew achieved only two of three planned satellite releases. The most important, deployment of the Wake Shield Facility, failed due to problems with the satellite.

The steel, saucer-shaped Wake Shield remained aboard instead of flying free for two days as intended. Physicists wanted to avoid shuttle contamination while developing semiconductor film on the Wake Shield; the film, if pure, could have led to faster computers.