SPACE shuttle Endeavour undocked from the international space station a day early yesterday, as NASA kept a wary eye on Hurricane Dean.

Budding astronomers will be hoping for clear skies tonight as the Space Shuttle Endeavour joins with the International Space Station (ISS) over Ireland.

Space shuttle Atlantis’ seven astronauts reunited with their families in Texas last night, a day after the space shuttle capped a two-week mission with a perfect landing in the Mojave Desert in California.

Space shuttle Atlantis and its seven astronauts took a detour across the US and landed safely in California, ending a two-week mission of construction on the international space station.

Hours after undocking from the international space station, Atlantis’ seven astronauts finished a final inspection of the space shuttle to make sure its heat shield was ready to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere.

A US software billionaire who won a junior cosmonaut contest as a child in Communist-ruled Hungary returned from a dream voyage to the international space station today, riding a Russian capsule to a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe along with a Russian and an American who spent seven months in orbit.

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying Simonyi and two Russian cosmonauts is to launch tonight from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Billionaire software engineer Charles Simonyi, on the verge of blasting off as the world’s fifth paying private space traveller, said today he hopes his journey will help develop civilian space flights.

In one of their last days before leaving the planet aboard a wardrobe-sized space capsule, two Russian cosmonauts and a US billionaire computer programmer enjoyed an array of earthly pleasures today.