Worrisome Problem Found Aboard Shuttle

Space shuttle Discovery safely returned home Saturday to questions about whether its launching only six days after the flight of another shuttle was enough time to check for potential problems.

It wasn’t until Discovery was aloft four days that engineers discovered a worrisome problem from the earlier flight - hot gas from burning rocket fuel had singed a primary O-ring seal in a nozzle joint of one of Atlantis’ two boosters.

A leak in a different booster joint caused Challenger to explode in 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Nonetheless, a nozzle failure could cause a shuttle to veer dangerously off course.

Shuttle manager Brewster Shaw said at a news conference that no gas escaped past the booster seal on Atlantis and its seven astronauts and cosmonauts faced no added danger when they rocketed away on a docking mission with the Russian space station Mir on June 27.

Discovery’s booster rockets will be inspected this week to see if they had the same problem - or potentially other problems.

Although the weather was fine at Kennedy Space Center early Saturday, Mission Control worried that high humidity might result in fog and low clouds similar to what scuttled Friday’s landing attempt.

Flight director Rich Jackson ordered the crew to skip a sunrise touchdown.

As Discovery circled Earth one more time, the good weather held and Mission Control notified the five astronauts to come home and end their 3.7 million-mile journey.