Endeavour, Astronauts Back on Earth

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said he told Gorie following touchdown that "he had really flown two missions in one for us."

"I can't imagine that the mission could have gone any better, and they made it look easy."

Returning aboard Endeavour was French Air Force Gen. Leopold Eyharts, who spent 1 1/2 months aboard the space station, and Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, who accompanied his country's space station contribution to orbit.

The Japanese Space Agency's vice president, Kaoru Mamiya, said he felt lucky to witness the safe landing of the shuttle. "It's the first step for our Kibo construction," he said.

The space station is now 70 percent complete, thanks to the latest additions, with a mass of nearly 600,000 pounds.

Ten more shuttle flights to the space station are scheduled over the next two years. NASA hopes to have its share of the orbiting outpost finished in 2010 and its three shuttles retired, so it can focus on human expeditions to the moon.

Discovery is scheduled to fly to the space station in late May, carrying up Japan's enormous Kibo lab. The fuel tank for that mission arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, later than planned, and Griffin said that almost certainly will mean a launch delay of at least a few days.

Subsequent fuel tanks also could get backed up because of all the design changes necessitated by the 2003 Columbia disaster.

NASA expects to have a better idea in another month of whether it can keep the year's launches on track.

On the space station, meanwhile, the three occupants are gearing up for next week's arrival of the European Space Agency's supply ship, Jules Verne. The unmanned cargo carrier the first of its kind rocketed away from French Guiana this month with a load of food, water and clothes.