“Houston, it’s great to be home. It was a great adventure”, space shuttle Endeavour commander George Zamka radioed after completing a rare night time landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida today.
Endeavour’s STS-130 mission, which made a 13-day successful trip to the International Space Station, was carrying six astronauts. It landed at Cape Canaveral at 10:21 tonight after a two-week mission to the International Space Station.
The shuttle made 217 orbits of Earth since launching on Feb. 8. Endeavour covered about 5,750,000 miles during the flight.
During the sojourn, which nearly completes the shuttle programs, the astronauts installed a new room and an observation deck. All that’s left are four shuttle flights to stock the outpost with more experiments.
NASA plans on putting an end to the shuttle program this fall. The ISS will then be supplied by craft from Russia, Europe and Japan.
The new room and observation deck were supplied by the European Space Agency at a cost of more than $400 million. Their addition brought the 11-year-old space station to 98 percent completion.
Weather looked to be an issue for the targeted Saturday landing, but the sky finally cleared and opened the window for the after dark landing.
It was only the 23rd shuttle landing in darkness, with the last occurring in 2008. Endeavour was also the shuttle that made that landing.
In fact, weather had forced a postponement by a day of its take off from earth on Feb 8.
President Barack Obama has decided to cancel the current shuttle replacement plan. The decision to cancel the Constellation program, as the replacement plan is known, comes in the wake of a $1.26 trillion federal deficit projected for 2011.