NASA delays Discovery landing until Tuesday
(AP)
Updated: 2005-08-08 17:35

After orbiting the Earth for nearly two weeks, astronauts aboard space shuttle Discovery were told to circle the planet for another day as bad weather in Florida forced NASA to delay Monday's scheduled landing, the Associated Press reported.

The astronauts had powered up their spacecraft and were awaiting word from Mission Control to fire their braking rockets and head for home when controllers announced early Monday that low clouds over Cape Canaveral would postpone the landing.

LeRoy Cain, the ascent/descent flight director for Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS114, addresses the media during a status briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston August 7, 2005. Discovery astronauts gave their spacecraft a final inspection on Sunday and said they were confident of a safe return to Earth on the first shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster. [Reuters]

"We've been working this pretty hard as I'm sure you can imagine from our silence down here," Mission Control radioed Discovery commander Eileen Collins. "We just can't get comfortable with the stability of the situation for this particular opportunity so we are going to officially wave you off for 24 hours."

When cloud cover still threatened after the second of two landing opportunities, NASA officials rescheduled the landing for Tuesday, when they would consider two alternative landing sites in addition to Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

"We will land somewhere on Tuesday," Flight Director LeRoy Cain said.

Before the weather deteriorated, Discovery had been set to land at Florida's Kennedy Space Center before dawn. Its return to Earth would have concluded the first shuttle flight since Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere 2 1/2 years ago.

Discovery's 13-day flight to the international space station may be the last one for a long while. NASA grounded the shuttle fleet after a slab of insulating foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during liftoff 錕斤拷 the very thing that doomed Columbia and was supposed to have been corrected.

After Discovery's July 26 launch, the shuttle spent nine days hitched to the space station, where astronauts resupplied the orbiting lab and removed broken equipment and trash 錕斤拷 one of the main goals of the mission.

Discovery was the first shuttle to visit the station since 2002.

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