Shuttle lands at Cape Canaveral

The Cape prepares for the Atlantis to land

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- NASA was watching the weather early Wednesday as cloud cover and rain threatened to prevent the on-time landing of space shuttle Atlantis.

Atlantis is scheduled to land shortly before 4 a.m. EDT. If the shuttle crew has to scratch that attempt, they'll try again about 5:33 a.m. EDT, on their next orbit of the planet. After that, the landing will have to be postponed until Thursday.

"This is not the ideal weather that had been expected," said NASA commentator Rob Navias, the voice of Mission Control in Houston. Forecasters, however, continued to hope that a line of showers moving up the Florida Peninsula would move too slowly to stop the landing.

The shuttle's mission so far has gone off without a hitch. "We've had a really great flight this time," flight director Wayne Hale said Tuesday.

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Space shuttles have landed in darkness only 14 times before. Nighttime landings are becoming more common, though, now that NASA has a space station in orbit. All three previous shuttle flights to the space station also ended in darkness.

During the mission, the 99th in the history of the shuttle program, the crew completed a week of docked operations aboard the space station, preparing the 13-story construction site for its first resident crew, scheduled to arrive in November.

The crew's 12-day mission was to outfit and supply the new crew quarters recently added to the station, activating some key hardware and leaving it ready for the three-man Expedition One team, which will live aboard the station for four months.

Among the supplies brought in for the future residents: shampoo, cream, shaving gel, moist towels and napkins, Russian and American meals, ear plugs, medical kits, labels, printer parts, clamps, brackets, camera equipment and small bags for the crew to use to relieve themselves in case the toilet jams.

The seven shuttle crewmen also installed the toilet, oxygen generator and treadmill in the new living quarters, and ran power and TV cables up the outside.

Getting an extra day helped. NASA stretched the mission to 12 days to give the astronauts more time inside.

"We started with 52 items in our to-do list and wound up doing 74 different tasks on board the station, large and small," Hale said Tuesday.

Another shuttle crew is scheduled to depart for the space station on October 5 aboard Discovery.

The station itself, a joint project of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, is in the early stages of construction and will not be completed before 2006. The station orbits some 240 miles (385 km) above the planet.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Human Space Flight (HSF) - International Space Station
Boeing's International Space Station page
Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis (OV-104)
Zarya: The Control Module
NASA

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