Touchdown for Space Shuttle

The Space Shuttle Endeavour has touched down at Cape Canaveral.

It is a long-awaited homecoming for the international space station's former commander Frank Culbertson.

Along with crewmates, Russian cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin, he spent 129 days in orbit.

The men circled earth more than 2,000 times and logged 53 million miles - more than half the distance between the Earth and the sun.

"We are looking forward to getting home for Christmas, especially Frank and his crew," shuttle commander Dominic Gorie said from orbit earlier in the day.

"It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful time, I think, to be reunited with families."

Culbertson's wife, Rebecca, and five children were on hand for his return. The wives of Dezhurov and Tyurin also were at the landing strip, but not their daughters, who remained home in Russia.

Culbertson and his crew were in orbit when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened and could see from 250 miles up the smoke rising from the devastation at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

"That was a horrible thing to see from space, to know that terrible things were happening on Earth like that and we were so far away from our own families," Culbertson said.