Shuttle Crew Looks Forward to Landing but May Be Delayed

With their mission accomplished, Discovery’s six astronauts looked forward to coming home today and taking their first showers in a week and a half.

They may have to wait.

Stormy weather was forecast for Kennedy Space Center at 11:23 a.m. PDT, the time of the scheduled landing. NASA could send the shuttle to Edwards Air Force Base in California later in the day. The astronauts have a second landing opportunity in Florida at 12:55 p.m. PDT if bad weather or technical problems force them to pass up the first.

“It’s pretty fatiguing up here. I think a lot of us are looking forward to getting home, getting a good shower and some good old earthbound things we enjoy,” Discovery’s pilot, L. Blaine Hammond Jr., said Sunday.

On the other hand, Hammond said he and his crew mates wouldn’t mind spending another day in orbit “because it’s an opportunity so rare.” They’ve been aloft since Sept. 9.

The astronauts achieved everything they set out to do. They released and retrieved a sun-gazing satellite, measured the damaging effects of their own jet exhaust on space structures and helped direct laser pulses at Earth for an atmospheric study.

And--most spectacularly--they tested a new jet pack during a rare untethered spacewalk.

Astronaut Mark Lee described the spacewalk as a once-in-a-lifetime “special treat.” He became the first human satellite in 10 years on Friday when he disconnected his lifeline and used the jet pack to drift over an open cargo bay.

Lee’s partner, Carl Meade, gave him a spin and a toss to see if the jet pack would steady an astronaut tumbling out of control. It did. Meade also tried out the jet pack.

“The total blackness of space just overwhelms you when you don’t see the shuttle,” Lee said during Sunday’s space-to-ground news conference. “That part was probably the scariest of the whole part: When you’re rotated, you’re tumbled and all of a sudden you see black . . . you hope that the shuttle shows up again when you come around.”

The $7-million jet pack, called Safer, is intended as an emergency rescue device for future space station crews.

Only two exist but NASA plans to build more now that engineers know Safer works. The new units should be ready by 1997.

During routine landing preparations, the crew test-fired the 38 steering jets. One jet failed; NASA said that would pose no problem for the trip home.