NASA skips first Friday landing slot for shuttle

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., June 22 (Reuters) NASA skipped its first opportunity to bring the US space shuttle Atlantis back home to Florida today because of continuing bad weather at the Kennedy Space Center.

The US space agency still has another chance to land the shuttle at Kennedy today after a two-week mission to the International Space Station or it may opt to land at a secondary site at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Summertime thunderstorms forced NASA to forego two landing opportunities at Kennedy yesterday. The shuttle and its seven astronauts have enough supplies to stay in orbit until Sunday but NASA officials have indicated they intend to bring the spacecraft back to Earth today.

NASA will have to decide promptly whether Florida remains an option for later in the day or whether to go for Edwards as the possible landing slots overlap -- 0124 hrs IST at Kennedy and 0119 hrs IST at Edwards.

''The mindset is we're going to land you safely some place today,'' astronaut Tony Antonelli from Mission Control in Houston radioed to Atlantis commander Frederick Sturckow before the decision was made to wave Atlantis off from Kennedy.

Atlantis was returning from a nine-day stay at the International Space Station, a 100 billion dollars project of 16 nations that is a little more than half finished.

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