SHUTTLE MAKES RARE EDWARDS LANDING.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE - Detoured by bad weather over Florida, the space shuttle Discovery made a picture-perfect landing Tuesday at Edwards Air Force Base, marking the first Edwards landing by a shuttle in more than four years.

Discovery's 1:59 p.m. landing concluded a nearly 13-day mission to ready the International Space Station for its first crew, with a NASA official rating the astronauts' performance ``an A-plus.''

``This is one of the most complex missions we've ever done,'' National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said after Discovery was back on Earth. ``We're raising the bar on what we're doing. The crew did a great job.''

Following a NASA announcement Tuesday morning that the base would be opened to visitors for the landing, about 2,000 people watched from a hillside viewing area near Dryden Flight Research Center.

The crowd cheered when Discovery appeared as a tiny white dot in the cloudless sky, cheered again upon hearing the shuttle's signature twin sonic booms and cheered a third time when the shuttle landing gear kicked up dust on Edwards' main runway.

The shuttle's flight path took it over the center of Los Angeles and across the San Fernando Valley, making its sonic booms audible to millions of people.

Among the Edwards spectators were Dennis and Rita Orr of Austin, Texas, who detoured to the base while driving home from visiting family in California. The couple was at a highway rest stop 20 miles away when they heard that the shuttle was landing at Edwards.

``It was serendipitous that we picked up that it was coming here,'' said Dennis Orr. ``We realized we're in the one spot on Earth where 5 billion people wished they were.''

The landing was a return trip for Discovery pilot Pam Melroy, who graduated from the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards in 1992, and was a C-17 transport aircraft test pilot there in the early 1990s.

Melroy, who in a 1994 Daily News interview said she had dreamed of flying in space since she was 11, left Edwards for astronaut training in 1995. Making her first flight into space on Discovery, Melroy was the third female pilot in shuttle history.

During the mission, she assisted Cmdr. Brian Duffy in docking with the International Space Station. She also undocked the orbiter from the station and conducted a fly-around.

The last time a shuttle landed at Edwards was in March 1996, when Atlantis landed there because of cloudy skies in Florida.

NASA usually lands shuttles in Florida to avoid the time and expense of ferrying the spacecraft cross-country atop a 747 for its next launch. Gusty winds Monday and Tuesday at Kennedy Space Center, however, caused NASA to divert Discovery to Edwards.

The craft had to stay in space an extra day because Monday's weather was bad at both potential landing spots: windy in Florida, cloudy and rainy in Southern California.

``We prefer to land at Kennedy because it gives us a leg up on processing, but Edwards is always there,'' Dittemore said.

In flight 12 days, 21 hours and 43 minutes, Discovery's crew installed the space station's $273 million Z1 truss, a framework structure to house communications and motion control equipment, and delivered the $20 million Pressurized Mating Adapter for future berthing of new station components and to accommodate shuttle dockings.

The mission had a true international flavor with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata using a Canadian-built manipulator arm to help install the Z1 truss. Discovery's crew made four space walks to complete the installation.

The International Space Station is now ready for its first crew.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

(color) The space shuttle Discovery touches down Tuesday at Edwards Air Force Base after bad weather in Florida forced the California landing.

Gene Blevins/Special to the Daily News