Endeavour set for final flight today

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: Space shuttle Endeavour apparently doesn’t want to leave home.
NASA’s youngest shuttle was supposed to depart Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Monday for its permanent museum home in Los Angeles. But stormy weather along the Gulf of Mexico nixed the travel plans until today morning.
The shuttle will be bolted to the top of a modified jumbo jet when it leaves Florida.
Endeavour will stop off in Houston, home to Mission Control, and fly low over NASA facilities en route. After a stop at Edwards Air Force Base in California, it will arrive at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, a day later than planned.
Endeavour, which retired last year, will go on display at the California Science Center.
Endeavour was built after the Challenger was destroyed in a fatal accident in 1986. Endeavour’s space life was relatively short by shuttle standards — just 25 missions over 20 years, totalling 299 days in space.
But those flights ran the gamut of orbital odysseys, including the sheer movie of its May 1992 debut when three astronauts made an impromptu and unprecedented spacewalk to rescue a stranded Intelsat communications satellite. Eighteen months later, Endeavour flew a high-stakes mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, which, to Nasa’s horror, had been launched in 1990 with a misshaped primary mirror.