Nasa delays Discovery landing

2005-08-08 11:15

Space Centre, Houston - After orbiting the Earth for nearly two weeks, astronauts aboard space shuttle Discovery were told to circle the planet for another day as bad weather in Florida forced Nasa to delay Monday's scheduled landing.

The astronauts had powered up their spacecraft and were awaiting word from Mission Control to fire their braking rockets and head for home when controllers announced early on Monday that low clouds over Cape Canaveral would postpone the landing.

"We've been working this pretty hard as I'm sure you can imagine from our silence down here," Mission Control radioed Discovery commander Eileen Collins. "We just can't get comfortable with the stability of the situation for this particular opportunity so we are going to officially wave you off for 24 hours."

When cloud cover still threatened after the second of two landing opportunities, Nasa officials rescheduled the landing for Tuesday, when they would consider two alternative landing sites in addition to Florida's Kennedy Space Centre.

"We will land somewhere on Tuesday," Flight Director LeRoy Cain said.

Set to land before dawn

Before the weather deteriorated, Discovery had been set to land at Florida's Kennedy Space Centre before dawn. Its return to Earth would have concluded the first shuttle flight since Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere 2.5 years ago.

Discovery's 13-day flight to the international space station may be the last one for a long while.

Nasa grounded the shuttle fleet after a slab of insulating foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during liftoff - the very thing that doomed Columbia and was supposed to have been corrected.

- AP