With a gentle nudge from its jets, the space shuttle discovery departed the International Space Station after a week of construction work that saw two new segments added to the orbiting outpost. Discovery's crew of seven was to be the last to visit the station before it becomes permanently occupied in November, when the first in a succession of expeditionary crews will arrive for stays of about four months each. The shuttle is scheduled to land on Sunday, but NASA said that it was willing to keep the astronauts in space an extra day, or even longer, should the high winds forecast at the Kennedy Space centre make a landing difficult. At Kennedy, discovery can undergo immediate post-flight processing. At the alternate landing site, near Edwards Air Force Base in California, the forecast is good but the shuttle would have to be ferried cross-continent back to Florida. ''It's important to the programme to get to KSC and give us as many days of margin as possible in getting this vehicle ready to support its next flight,'' said Randy Stone, the Director of mission operations. That next flight is in just four months, a quick turnaround for a space programme that until recently saw shuttles languish in the hangars up to a year between missions. The sense of urgency is due to the International Space Station, which after spending years as a concept, is ready to become an outpost. ''We've got about 15 missions in the next 10 months, which is an absolutely awesome amount of work, beyond anything undertaken in human space flight before,'' said Jim Van Laak, the program's manager for operations and launch integration. Discovery's commander, Brian Duffy, and his team outfitted the station with a new docking port, the second for US Space Shuttles. Two other ports are available for use by Russian Soyuz and progress ships. The crew also added the base piece of a truss system that will eventually support the largest array of solar panels ever flown in space. The first of those is to arrive in late November aboard another shuttle. This 100th mission of the US Shuttle programme involved a high degree of difficulty. Four spacewalks were required to bring the truss and docking port into line after Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata put them on the station with the shuttle's 50-foot (15-metre) robotic arm. Space officials said that the work of this crew had raised the bar for future space station construction crews.
Bureau Report