CAPE CANAVERAL — With smiles all around, the seven astronauts of the space shuttle Discovery entered the international space station Thursday, with one of them planning to stay behind when the shuttle returns to Earth in 10 days. Flight director Tony Ceccacci called the rendezvous perfect.
"We achieved one of our, of course, major goals of this flight," he said.
The two men aboard the space station snapped 350 photos of the approaching shuttle to document any damage to the thermal skin, Ceccacci said. There was no immediate word on whether any problems were noted in the 125 pictures beamed to Mission Control as of early afternoon.
Even though the mission was going smoothly, the control center had not returned to a sense of normalcy, Ceccacci said. "It's more of a sense of, 'Hey, the things we've done to make the ... tank better are working,'" he said.
The European Space Agency's Thomas Reiter of Germany brings the space station to a three-member crew for the first time in three years. Reiter, who will stay for six months, is the first European to live on the space station.
After hatches opened at 12:30 p.m. ET, the shuttle crew was greeted by American astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov. The astronaut reunion occurred about 100 minutes after the station and shuttle docked in a delicate dance at 17,500 miles per hour, about 220 miles above Earth.
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