Space shuttle heads home to Florida

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour left orbit on Wednesday and began an hour-long glide back to Florida, capping a mission that delivered the first part of a Japanese laboratory to space.

Touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center was expected at 8:39 p.m. EDT.

During a 16-day construction mission to the International Space Station, the visiting Endeavour crew conducted five spacewalks to install a storage room for Japan's Kibo laboratory, assemble a Canadian-built maintenance robot and prepare the station for future components.

Concerns over clouds near Kennedy forced NASA to skip an earlier opportunity to land and bring to a close the longest shuttle mission since flights resumed following the 2003 Columbia disaster. But Endeavour commander Dominic Gorie said he and his crew felt comfortable about the nighttime landing.

Flying tail-first 215 miles above Earth, Gorie and pilot Greg Johnson fired the shuttle's twin rockets to slow the ship an hour or so before the landing, allowing the gravity of Earth to tug it from orbit.

A handful of technical glitches that surfaced during the flight, including a tiny nick in one of the shuttle's cockpit windows, was not expected to be an issue, said flight director Richard Jones.

The returning Endeavour crew includes French astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who spent seven weeks aboard the space station setting up Europe's new Columbus laboratory. He was replaced by NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.

The U.S. space agency plans 10 more shuttle missions to construct and supply the station before the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. It also has a shuttle mission scheduled this year to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

(Editing by Jim Loney and Michael Christie)