Mission Accomplished

Sally Ride and friends have the time of their lives

It was almost, but not quite, a perfect performance. As the early morning sun glinted off its wings, Challenger came swooping out of the skies like a giant California condor and touched softly down right on the runway's center line. "Great-looking landing," said Mission Control against a background of cheers and applause. About the only thing that marred the conclusion of the seventh shuttle mission, highlighted by the presence of the first American woman in space, was some damage to the shuttle's brakes and protective tiles. Yet Challenger's flight ended on a slightly disappointing note. Instead of landing on the new three-mile-long shuttle runway at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, the spacecraft was diverted at the last minute to California's sprawling Edwards Air Force Base. As Mission Control put it to the Challenger crew, there was some very cold beer waiting for them, except "it's 3,000 miles away."

The culprit, as Californians gleefully observed, was scuddy Florida weather. When it became apparent in the early hours of the morning on Challenger's sixth and last day in orbit that the sun would not burn away the morning fog and the winds would not chase away the low-hanging clouds over Cape Canaveral, Mission Control in Houston sent up the gloomy message: rather than attempt a first-ever shuttle landing at Kennedy, Challenger would put down on its next orbit (its 98th) on the dried-out lake bed in the Mojave Desert where shuttles have come home from space on five previous occasions. True to the Right Stuff test-pilot tradition from which he hails, Navy Captain Robert Crippen, 45, Challenger's commander and the only space veteran on board, acknowledged the decision with cool resignation. Said he: "Well, we would like to have gone in there very much, but if the weather's bad, that's not the right thing to do."

The eleventh-hour diversion showed, as President Reagan noted in a congratulatory postflight telephone chat with the Challenger crew, that for all of NASA's "miracles" in space, "no one can do anything about the weather." Reagan had hoped to be watching at the Kennedy Space Center and, as slightly cynical Washington political observers speculated, perhaps bolster his popularity among women voters by personally welcoming Sally Ride, 32, the pioneering U.S. woman space traveler, on her return. But he scrubbed his visit after indications grew that foul weather might interfere with the Florida landing; the White House explained that Reagan did not want his presence to be a factor in deciding when and where to bring down the spacecraft.