Shuttle

Two days after the return of Discovery, NASA officials said that the next shuttle mission will probably be delayed until November because engineers have been unable to figure out why insulating foam fell off the spacecraft's external fuel tank. Officials had been hoping to be able to clear up the foam problem in time for a September launch of Atlantis. "We didn't find any root cause" for the foam incident, said William Gerstenmeier, the program manager of the International Space Station.

HOUSTON -- Discovery is poised for a rendezvous with the International Space Station this morning after inspections of the shuttle's heat shielding yesterday turned up no signs of serious damage. Discovery's astronauts used laser sensors and a camera on a 50-foot boom to examine the nose and wings of the spaceship after Tuesday's launch from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA managers said the shuttle so far appears to be in great shape. "We didn't see anything with the quick look as the crew was doing the survey that would cause us any concern," said John Shannon, NASA's deputy shuttle program manager.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Space shuttle Discovery could return home today to an unusual sort of white Christmas that NASA managers want to avoid. Only once in 114 previous landings has the shuttle touched down at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, a blanched desert of gypsum sand so desolate that the first atomic bomb was detonated there. White Sands' Northrup Strip traditionally has been viewed by NASA as a shuttle runway of last resort, available in case circumstances prevented a return to primary landing sites at the Kennedy Space Center or Southern California's Edwards Air Force Base.

The River City Shuttle begins free weekday bus services in Havre de Grace next Monday, county administrators announced.The shuttle service -- similar to the Town-Go-Round in Bel Air -- will operate Monday through Friday, making 45-minute loops between 9:30 a.m. and 4:08 p.m.The shuttle will make 19 stops, including Chesapeake Industrial Park, Battery Village, Seneca and Wilson streets, Wilson and BloomburyAvenue, Bloombury and Giles Street, J. M. Huber Co.,...

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. -- The shuttle Discovery glided to a safe landing here yesterday, bringing to a close one of the more eventful shuttle missions in the history of the shuttle program. Commander Pamela A. Melroy fired the shuttle's braking rockets just before noon, beginning the return from orbit. The shuttle flew over North America from the northwest to the southeast, coming in to a landing on the 15,000-foot landing strip about 1 p.m. The mission started out as a pivotal moment in space station construction, tightly packed with goals that included bringing a new room to the station - the Harmony module - and relocating an enormous solar array and truss from its temporary position atop the station to its permanent location at the left-hand end of the station.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's astronauts say their space shuttle training suffers from technical glitches, inexperienced instructors, outdated textbooks and a shortage of simulator equipment, according to an internal agency report.The report, based on a survey of the astronaut corps, found that, although shuttle crews have managed to make up for shortfalls in the program by teaching themselves, the training system is "grossly inadequate" for handling more than 10 flights a year, something the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hopes to do starting in 1993.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA could finally get good weather this week for the planned launch of space shuttle Atlantis. Meteorologists are predicting an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions for Wednesday's 12:28 p.m. scheduled liftoff. The primary concerns are storm clouds and isolated showers. "A dryer atmosphere and the launch time should provide decent conditions," said a forecast issued yesterday by Patrick Air Force Base's 45th Weather Squadron. If the launch is delayed until Thursday or Friday, meteorologists are predicting a 70 percent chance of good weather for those opportunities.

The space shuttle Atlantis is racing to catch up with the Hubble Space Telescope after a nearly flawless launch Monday into clear skies. If all goes well, four astronauts will begin a series of spacewalks Thursday to repair and upgrade the 19-year-old observatory for the last time before the shuttle program ends next year. "It was fantastic," said Mario Livio, a senior scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch. "There were tears in my eyes when I saw the shuttle go off," he said.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Amid lingering concerns that insulating foam might flake off the space shuttle's external fuel tank, NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin said yesterday that today's scheduled launch of Discovery is a risk worth taking. "You're not going to like this, and I'm sure I'm not going to like the way it sounds in print," Griffin said at a media briefing near the shuttle's launch pad. "But we are playing the odds." Balancing the danger of a catastrophe like the ones that destroyed Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 against the pressure to adhere to a schedule that calls for shutting down the shuttle program in 2010 "is what you pay us for as taxpayers," he said.

If the skies are clear after midnight tonight, Marylanders may get a chance to watch as the space shuttle Discovery rockets up the East Coast toward a rendezvous Sunday with the Russian space station Mir.The launch is scheduled for 12:49 a.m. EST, and Discovery is programmed to climb northeast from Cape Canaveral."