The space shuttle Discovery- bringing home the first crew of the International Space Station (ISS) - landed safely in the dark at the Kennedy Space Centre today.
NASA decided to land the shuttle at its home field despite weather conditions that were at the margins of acceptability for wind, cloud and rain.
The shuttle completed 201 orbits of the planet on its 13-day mission. It delivered some five tons of supplies and hardware to the space station and facilitating the first crew transfer in the station's history.
The station's inaugural crew, known as Expedition One, completed 141 days in space with the landing.
American William Shepherd and Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalyov brought the station to life and watched it grow into the largest spacecraft ever to fly. A laboratory module and an enormous solar-power array were added during their stay.
Although Shepherd was the station's commander he remains the least experienced spacefarer of the group with 159 total days in orbit, including earlier shuttle missions.
Gidzenko, with 320 days in space, and Krikalyov, with 625, are both veterans of the Russian Mirprogramme.
Their replacements, the Expedition Two crew of Russian Yury Usachev and Americans Susan Helms and James Voss, were left behind when Discoverydeparted the station.
The shuttle also carried the first space-station module designed to return to Earth.
The Italian-built Leonardomodule was used to carry up the station's first "hard science" experiments, new computers and supplies for the new crew.
