Relief greets Discovery upon return

From the Johnson Space Centre in Texas to Capitol Hill in Washington DC, the relief was obvious when space shuttle Discovery safely returned to terra firma.

Launch director Mike Leinbach reminded reporters that after the shuttle blasted off on July 26, he said the only thing better would be landing day.

“I’m here to tell you that it really is truly better,” Leinbach said in a news conference at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

Their relief was shared by some families of the crew of space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere 2 1/2 years ago, killing its crew of seven.

Dr Jon Clark, husband of Columbia astronaut Laurel Clark and a NASA neurologist, was waiting at Kennedy to watch the landing. He said although the weather in Florida “didn’t look too bad,” the space agency was right when it “took the conservative approach” and diverted the landing to Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert.

He said he quietly thought of his late wife and closely compared the two missions during Discovery’s approach.

“I thought, ’This is when the tyre light went on,”’ Clark said, referring to one of Mission Control’s initial sensor readings that Columbia was breaking up. “I was paralleling the two missions.”

Long after touchdown, the tension of the two-week mission and the pre-dawn landing still was apparent. Compliments overflowed to commander Eileen Collins, the nation’s first female shuttle pilot, and the rest of the six-member crew for what appeared to be a silky smooth landing. It was Collins’ fourth shuttle mission and second in the commander’s seat.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin even joked that he might abdicate his position in favour of Collins.

“She’s better looking than I am,” he said, “and she’s a better pilot.”

Others curbed their euphoria – at least in public. They described the mission as a test flight as well as a servicing visit to the international space station. The crew had to deal with unknowns and mid-flight corrections, right to the decision to divert to the Edwards runway because of weather concerns in Florida.

“A soda straw of re-entry in the middle of night at Edwards,” NASA spaceflight chief Bill Readdy said. “There isn’t any of this that is easy. Eileen made it look like a cakewalk.”

Astronaut Mark Polansky said he “couldn’t help but think a little bit about the crew of Columbia, about the families.”

“I know all of them and they would have wanted us to continue,” he said. “So I know they were all watching down and helping Discovery get back through this.”

In Washington, politicians immediately shifted their focus to future considerations – including persistent problems with insulating foam dangerously breaking off the shuttle’s fuel tank – once it became clear that the shuttle had landed safely.

“This was a test flight and it gave NASA a better understanding of how to solve the Shuttle’s perplexities for future launches,” said Ken Calvert, a Republican congressman from California, who oversees NASA as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.

“Ultimately,” Calvert said, “I know we must retire the shuttle and replace it with a new vehicle.”

“We have a number of challenges ahead and future shuttle flights are suspended until the foam problem can be adequately addressed,” said House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert from New York.