First female commander guides shuttle to 'beautiful landing'

Columbia touches down at Cape Canaveral Tuesday night
INTERACTIVE Clickable Chandra  ALSO: In-Depth: Apollo 11 at 30 MESSAGE BOARDS: Space Shuttle QUICKTIME Watch highlights of the landing 50 sec. 3.7 mb QuickTime movie Friday's shuttle launch 40 sec. 3.5 mb QuickTime movie NASA animation of Chandra deployment from shuttle cargo bay 1.1 mb QuickTime movie Please enable Javascript VIDEO Shuttle Columbia lands in Florida after successful 5 day mission Windows Media 28K 80K

July 28, 1999
Web posted at: 12:49 a.m. EDT (0449 GMT)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (CNN) -- The first woman to command a U.S. spacecraft brought the space shuttle Columbia in for a landing Tuesday night, completing a five-day mission that successfully released a powerful X-ray telescope into orbit.

U.S. Air Force Col. Eileen Collins was at the helm for the touchdown at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 11:20 p.m. EDT.

"Welcome home," Mission Control said after the shuttle rolled safely to a stop. "Eileen to you and the crew, just an outstanding job deploying Chandra (the telescope) and bringing Columbia home for a beautiful landing."

Although pilot Jeff Ashby steered the craft for much of the mission, commanders always pilot the shuttle during landings.

The landing was only the 12th night landing in the shuttle's 95 flights, but Collins was confident it would proceed smoothly.

Minutes earlier, Columbia appeared as a gold and white streak in the sky as it passed over the home of Mission Control.

"You look great passing over Houston right now. Beautiful shot," radioed Mission Control.

The five-person crew released the Chandra X-ray Observatory into space on the first day of the mission. The $1.5 billion telescope is in excellent condition in an orbit up to tens of thousands of miles high.

There were some rough spots during the launch on Friday. NASA detected a short circuit in Columbia's control systems just after liftoff and then reported a possible hydrogen fuel leak.

NASA engineers looked forward to inspecting Columbia to see if hydrogen fuel was leaking from an engine during liftoff, as photographs suggest. They also hope to determine what caused a short circuit five seconds into the flight.

"I know that they suspect that there may have been a very small leak somewhere in the nozzle -- in fact, so small that the engines never even approached one of the red-line limits that may have caused it to shut down," Collins said.

If the leak had grown, the shuttle could have been forced to do an unprecedented emergency landing in Florida or West Africa. "The crew would have been ready to do whatever would have been needed," said Collins, 42, a former test pilot.

Collins said she is looking forward to reuniting with her family. "I can't wait to get home and get back to a normal life again," Collins said in a TV interview that linked her with her airline-pilot husband, Pat Youngs.

"We do like to travel, and I think being up here in the shuttle is the ultimate travel," she said. "It's a lot of work, though. I wouldn't exactly call it a vacation."

Youngs also was anxious to get the family back together, telling Collins that their 3 1/2-year-old daughter, Bridget, missed her. "She's had enough time with Dad," he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.