STS-114 landed safely at Edwards Air Force base in California just minutes ago. NASA prefers to land it back at the Cape so they don’t have the spend a million dollars and 2 weeks shuttling it across the country on the back of a 747, but the weather in Florida did not cooperate.
Yeah, I’m just glad our astronauts found a friendly path back to the ground. This is good for national morale and for NASA.
I just heard on the news that it’ll only take a week to get it back to the Cape. So maybe it’ll only cost 1/2 as much. 🙂
maybe they refined the process a bit. 😉
Maybe FedEx is running a special.
God help me, as soon as I heard the landing had moved to California, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was so that if it did break up in flight, the debris would fall in the ocean and not over the United States.
I can’t recall the last time I was so relieved to be wrong.
J.
Actually, Jay Tea, they changed the approach path to the landing so that, for the first time, it passed over no populated areas. I guess they weren’t so confident themselves.
Ground Tracks…
http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/crew/landing.html