Delay-Plagued Shuttle Mission Ends as Endeavour Comes Home

Space shuttle Endeavour, days late and low on life support, finally made it home Saturday, landing safely at Kennedy Space Center.

The shuttle landed at 2:37 p.m. after a three-day delay, the longest in the 21-year history of the space shuttle program.

The postponement was caused by a cold front across the eastern United States. The front brought a major snowstorm to much of the Southeast, Northeast and the Middle Atlantic states, and knocked out power to more than 1 million homes.

In Florida, the story was high winds, rain and storm clouds since Wednesday, Endeavour’s original landing date.

Weather continued a cat-and-mouse game with Mission Control until the final moments before the shuttle commander, Navy Capt. James Wetherbee, fired the reentry rockets.

Thick cloud cover over Cape Canaveral had receded, but as Wetherbee steered the 100-ton orbiter toward its 3-mile-long landing strip, he fought crosswinds right at the allowable limit of 17 mph.

Although the shuttle had enough fuel for three landing attempts Saturday and two Sunday, life support for the crew would have run out sometime after the second attempt Sunday, NASA said.

Seven astronauts were aboard the shuttle, three of them a returning crew who spent more than six months on the international space station.

The others launched 15 days ago, delivered a new crew to the space station and added a 14-ton girder to the orbiting science lab. They left the station Monday.

The crew had little to do since Wednesday except repeat the exercise of donning spacesuits and preparing to fire Endeavour’s reentry rockets, only to have the “stand down” order come each time.

Pickup games of “Jeopardy” with Mission Control helped keep them amused, and for a wake-up call Saturday, ground controllers played “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

The crew even joked that if they could not land on Earth, they might look elsewhere. “We’ve polled the crew and we’re ‘go’ for the moon,” said astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who made three spacewalks during the mission.

NASA always tries to land shuttles at their home base in Florida. Landing at an alternate site in California can delay that orbiter’s next launch and costs $900,000 to fly it 3,000 miles cross-country atop a Boeing 747.

NASA had a battery of tests awaiting the returning space station crew -- American Peggy Whitson and Russians Valery Korzun and Sergei Treschyov. They have been weightless for 185 days, and scientists want to study them before they readapt to gravity.

Endeavour’s Nov. 23 launch was also late. A series of difficulties, including bad weather and mechanical failures, put it six weeks behind schedule.