Home Sweet Home: Shuttle Lands Safely
NASA cites expense as reason for wanting to avoid Edwards touchdown.
June 22, 2007 — -- Atlantis swept in on a clear cloudless day and landed on the dusty lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base today. Cameras picked up the shuttle from quite a distance, and it looked almost ghostly as it headed toward the runway.
"Congratulations on a good mission," STS 117 shuttle communicator Tony Antonelli said as he welcomed the crew home after Atlantis rolled to a stop.
Atlantis completed a 14-day trip, traveling 5.8 million miles. This was its 28th mission, bringing home a crew of seven on STS 117, including astronaut Sunita Williams. Williams set a new endurance record for women -- 194 days in orbit after six months on the International Space Station.
On its mission, the crew installed a new truss, with solar arrays, on the International Space Station. The Russians believe the solar arrays prompted their computer failure, though NASA says there is no proof of that.
The crew carried out four spacewalks, including a spectacular unrehearsed fix of the thermal blanket near the shuttle's tail. Atlantis also provided stability control for the ISS when the Russian computers failed, causing NASA to consider de-manning the space station, a drastic move that would have had serious consequences for the space program.
Atlantis is leaving the space station in a symmetrical configuration.
Scheduled to launch Aug. 9, the next shuttle flight is STS 118; the mission will carry Barbara Morgan, the first teacher in space, to the space station.
Flight director Norm Knight wanted Atlantis to land at the Kennedy Space Center, but bad weather in Florida prevented a touchdown.
The last shuttle to land at Edwards was STS 114 in August 2005 -- the first space shuttle flight after the Columbia accident in 2003.
There is a lot of runway at the Edward Air Force Base in California.
Fifty shuttle flights have landed there before but there are several reasons why NASA doesn't like to land in California. It slows down the time it takes NASA to turn a shuttle around for the next flight, and Atlantis is scheduled to fly another mission in December, when the launch window is only seven days.
That doesn't give the space agency as much time as it would like to get the shuttle ready for its next flight.
It is also expensive to land at Edwards; NASA has put the cost at $1.7 million. The agency has to fly people from Florida to California to process the shuttle, and then mount the shuttle on the back of a 747 to fly it back to the Kennedy Space Center.
Thirteen shuttle flights have been extended by bad weather, science extensions and other issues. The record holder for delays was STS 113 Endeavour in December 2002, which stayed four days longer than planned because of bad weather at the Kennedy Space Center.
Mission Control played "I'll Be Home for Christmas" as a wake-up song for the crew of that mission one morning, a wistful promise.