Shuttle Lands in California

E D W A R D S   A I R   F O R C E   B A S E, Calif., Feb. 20 -- Space shuttle Atlantis andits crew landed in the Mojave Desert today after threestraight days of bad weather prevented the ship from returning toits Florida home port.

Atlantis swooped through a hazy sky and touched down at 12:33p.m. PT — 13 days after lifting off for the international spacestation. During the mission, the five astronauts delivered andinstalled a $1.4 billion laboratory that is considered the mostsophisticated research module ever to fly in space.

"Welcome back to Earth after placing our Destiny in space,"Mission Control said, referring to the new laboratory.

NASA officials had hoped to land the shuttle atKennedy Space Center in Florida, but clouds blocked a touchdown for three days and forced a detour to Edwards Air Force Base in California. A loud sonic boom was heard in the LosAngeles area five minutes earlier as the shuttle descended throughthe atmosphere over Southern California.

Expensive Transport

An Edwards landing requires the shuttle to be ferried back toFlorida atop a modified Boeing 747 at a cost of nearly $1 million.

Space shuttle landings are infrequent at Edwards, which servedas the main touchdown site until the early 1990s. The last shuttlelanding at Edwards was in October. The last one before that was in1996.

Because of the weather delays, Cockrell and his crew spent twodays circling Earth with little to do except gaze at Earth, snappictures and exercise on a stationary cycle.

During their one week at space station Alpha, the astronautsdelivered and then hooked up NASA's most expensive piece of thespace station, the Destiny laboratory.

Three spacewalks were needed to install the lab, hang a shutteron its porthole — the finest optical-quality window ever built intoa spacecraft — and attach other gear to the space station. It will be another few weeks before Destiny gets any scienceexperiments; space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to lift off March8 with the first batch. But already, the computer-filled lab moduleis controlling the steering of the space station and savingprecious rocket-thruster fuel.