Associated Press
The shuttle Discovery and its crew returned to Earth on Wednesday, concluding a 15-day space station build-and-repair mission that was among the most challenging—and heroic—in shuttle history.
The space shuttle touched down just after 1 p.m. EST, after safely crossing the United States in the first coast-to-coast reentry since the shuttle Columbia disintegrated almost five years ago.
Commander Pamela Melroy was greeted by crisp fall weather as she brought Discovery down on the runway.
The seven shuttle astronauts and three residents of the International Space Station teamed up during the docked mission to save a mangled solar wing.
It was one of the most difficult and dangerous repairs ever attempted in orbit, but the future of the space station was riding on it. Astronaut Scott Parazynski pulled it off in a single spacewalk.
"Congratulations on a tremendous mission and a great landing, Pam," Mission Control radioed once the shuttle rolled to a stop.
On its way home, Discovery crossed over Canada's British Columbia and made a diagonal descent over Montana, Wyoming, the U.S. Great Plains, the Deep South and, finally, down into Florida.
NASA opted for the route over more populated areas to avoid the previously scheduled but riskier predawn landing in darkness and to give the crew some extra rest after such a long and strenuous flight.
Double inspections of the spaceship's wings in orbit confirmed the thermal shielding would hold up to the 3,000-degree Fahrenheit (1,630-degree Celsius) heat of atmospheric reentry.
Discovery's journey spanned 238 revolutions of Earth and 6.25 million miles (10 million kilometers).
Even before the mission began October 23, the astronauts knew they were in for one of the most challenging and complicated space station construction missions ever.
They had no trouble installing a pressurized compartment named Harmony and moving a girder from one side of the space station to another, and even managed to peek into a clogged joint needed to turn the right-side set of solar wings.
