With clear, crisp weather back home, space shuttle Atlantis aimed for an on-time landing Friday morning in Florida to wrap up an 11-day mission to the International Space Station.

Mission Control told the seven astronauts that no one could remember such clear landing conditions at NASA’s touchdown site in Cape Canaveral. The temperature was in the 50s at dawn.

“The view that we have … looks absolutely stellar,” Mission Control radioed. “I think you’ll be pleased upon arrival.”

Atlantis’ astronauts spent a week stockpiling the space station. They delivered big spare parts and performed three spacewalks to install the equipment and carry out maintenance.

The pumps, gyroscopes and storage tanks should keep the outpost in business for another five to 10 years, long after Atlantis and the two other shuttles are retired.

Crew member Nicole Stott is returning to Earth after spending three months at the space station. Friday marked her 91st day in orbit. Stott said she can’t wait to see her husband and 7-year-old son, who were at Cape Canaveral waiting for her early Friday. She also said she wants pizza and icy cola.

Fellow astronaut Randolph Bresnik had even bigger plans: to hold his infant daughter for the first time.

Abigail Mae Bresnik was born last weekend right after her father took his first spacewalk. But he’ll have to wait until Saturday to see her. Bresnik’s wife, Rebecca, stayed home in Houston with Abigail and 3-year-old big brother Wyatt.

Atlantis — which is bringing back broken equipment from the space station’s water-recycling system — will have logged 4.5 million miles and circled Earth 171 times by flight’s end.

This was Atlantis’ next-to-last mission. Only five shuttle flights remain, all to the space station next year. Station construction will essentially end at that point, so NASA used the trip to send up as many hefty spare parts as possible. None of the other visiting spacecraft — from Russia, Japan and Europe — can carry so much in a single load.

Atlantis, which delivered nearly 15 tons of gear, left the space station 86 percent complete.

NASA’s next shuttle flight is in February. Endeavour will deliver a full-fledged module to the space station, complete with a cupola for prime Earth gazing with its domed chamber has seven windows.

The five remaining space station residents may have to dodge a piece of space junk this weekend.

NASA said Friday that flight controllers were monitoring a large piece of an old Delta rocket that could pass within an uncomfortably close six miles of the outpost Saturday afternoon. The rocket was used to launch NASA’s Stardust spacecraft in 1999 to gather comet dust samples.

A decision on whether to move the space station to avoid a possible hit was expected later Friday.

NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis is closing in on the International Space Station and on track to link up with the orbiting laboratory later today.

Atlantis and its crew of six astronauts are due to arrive at the space station at about 11:53 a.m. EST to deliver tons of vital spare parts and other bulky gear that only NASA’s shuttles can haul.

“We’re ready to get to station tomorrow,” shuttle commander Charlie Hobaugh radioed Mission Control in Houston late Tuesday. “See you then.”

An early look at data from a Tuesday inspection of the heat shield panels lining Atlantis’ nose cap and wing edges has found no immediate cause for concern. NASA experts will continue to analyze that data, as well as the images from today’s photo session, to be sure.

“Preliminarily, we don’t have any significant issues,” said LeRoy Cain, head of Atlantis’ mission management team. NASA has kept a close watch on the health of its shuttles since the tragic loss of shuttle Columbia and its astronaut crew in 2003 due to heat shield damage.

Atlantis launched Monday and is hauling more than 27,000 pounds of cargo to the space station, including a pair of massive carrier platforms laden with large spare parts for the orbiting laboratory. The spares, which include huge gyroscopes, pumps and other gear, will be installed at the station during three spacewalks planned for the 11-day space mission.

The shuttle will also ferry NASA astronaut Nicole Stott back home from the space station.

Stott has been living aboard the station since late August as part of the outpost’s six-person crew. She will return home on Atlantis and is currently the last astronaut planned to be rotated on and off the station using a NASA shuttle before the fleet is retired in the next year or so.

Stott and her crewmates have been tackling some glitches with the station’s systems.

A 150-pound device used to distill astronaut urine into pure drinking water is broken and will have to be returned to Earth on Atlantis. The stations’ water processing assembly is also experiencing problems.

Neither glitch is expected to pose any concern to Atlantis’ week-long stay at the space station, Cain said.

Mission Control roused the Atlantis astronauts at 4:28 a.m. EST with the song “Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder, a tune specially selected for mission specialist Bobby Satcher, who is making his first spaceflight.

“We’re looking forward to a good day,” Satcher said.

At times, NASA’s attempts to launch a new Ares I-X rocket Tuesday seemed surreal — with bad weather, a stuck sensor sock and a wayward cargo ship offshore appearing to conspire to prevent the booster’s liftoff. But believe it or not, there have been stranger things to pop up in NASA’s launch history.

There was an astronaut who peed in his spacesuit before liftoff — a seemingly inauspicious start to what became the first American manned spaceflight. Bats and vultures have besieged space shuttles at the launch pad, not to mention lightning, which tried and failed to tackle NASA’s mightiest rocket.

NASA is hoping for better weather — and luck — on Wednesday morning, when it has another four-hour window to try and launch the $445 million Ares I-X rocket. The rocket launch is NASA’s first suborbital test of the new Ares I booster to launch astronauts to space aboard its shuttle successor, the Orion craft.

The launch was delayed several times due to weather and some unexpected oddities like a stubborn sock-like cover that forced engineers into a tug-of-war battle with the Ares I-X until it finally came free. At one point, when weather finally cleared, an errant cargo ship strayed into the danger zone on the Eastern Range, a patch of restricted waters on the Atlantic Ocean over which rocket launches fly.

The Ares I-X delays were frustrating to say the least. But here’s a look at some of the weirder moments, many from recent missions, in NASA’s manned launch history:

No potty breaks
The pinnacle of manned space oddities may be one of the first. On May 5, 1962, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard — one of the original seven Mercury spaceflyers — was ready to become the first American in space. Clad in a bright silver spacesuit, he climbed into his capsule Freedom 7 and engineers bolted the hatch shut behind him. The launch was delayed over and over, and then he had to pee.

Shepard, who died in 1998 at age 74, related the experience in the book “Moonshot,” which he wrote with fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton.

‘I’ve got to pee. I’ve been in here forever,” Shepard radioed launch control. “The gantry is still right here, so why don’t you guys let me out of here for a quick stretch?”

But the answer was no. Shepard ultimately opted to urinate in his shiny spacesuit, but asked launch control to switch the power off to his medical sensors first. Astronauts can now add adult diapers to their spacesuits to avoid similar embarrassing situations. There is a Russian tradition among cosmonauts, however, to intentionally pee on the bus taking them to the Soyuz launch pad that dates back to the first-ever human space launch by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who launched a month earlier than Shepard.

Lightning vs. Saturn V
There’s good reasoning behind NASA’s weather rules for launching spacecraft. No one wants to get hit by lightning, but that’s what happened to the massive Saturn V rocket launching the Apollo 12 mission — the second manned moon landing — on Nov. 14, 1969. A bolt hit the rocket 36 seconds after liftoff, causing some tense moments.

“I don’t know what happened here, we had everything in the world drop out,” Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad radioed Mission Control. “I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.”

The bolt did not cause serious damage and Apollo 12 went on to make a successful, pinpoint landing on the moon near an old unmanned Surveyor probe.

But wild tales are by no means the norm for human spaceflight and NASA is hoping for a less eventful day of launch attempts for Ares I-X on Wednesday.

The rocket has a 60 percent chance of good weather, but NASA will be sure to watch the high upper level winds, cloudy weather and a static electricity risk called triboelectrification — which can interfere with the telemetry and electronics on Ares I-X — during the next attempt.

NASA’s much-hyped mission to hurl a spacecraft into the moon turned out some worthwhile data after all, scientists said.

New images show a mile-high plume of lunar debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency’s Centaur rocket struck Oct. 9.

“We were blown away by the data returned,” Anthony Colaprete, the mission’s chief scientist, said in a report Friday from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which managed the launch. “The team is working hard on the analysis, and the data appear to be of very high quality.”

In media coverage before the impact, many observers said they were disappointed at the lack of spectacle.

But scientists said the mission was carried out for “a scientific purpose, not to put on a fireworks display for the public,” said space consultant Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator for science.

By creating the debris cloud, scientists were able to use the $79-million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite to sample and study the dust. The LCROSS itself crashed into the same crater four minutes after the Centaur’s impact, right on schedule, while its companion spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, was flying in lunar orbit 50 miles above the site to gather still more data.

But Michio Kaku, a professor at the City College of New York and host of “Sci Q Sundays” on the Science Channel, said NASA may be jumping the gun in calling the results “a smashing success,” acting in response to public criticism of the mission.

“To be a spectacular success, we had to find large quantities of underground ice,” Kaku told The Associated Press Saturday. He said scientists still have more work to do to analyze the data for the presence of ice or water.

“They got beautiful pictures of the event, but that’s not why we spent $79 million,” Kaku said. “Ice on the moon is more valuable than gold.”

The crashes created a man-made crater about one-fifth the size of a football field, Brown University geologist and LCROSS scientist Peter Schultz told The AP.

Colaprete said it was too early to say what the plume contained but that several clues, including the temperature of the flash created by the crash, will help scientists find out in coming weeks.

Finding significant amounts of water on the moon would be a major discovery, making eventual colonization easier than it would be if settlers had to transport water from Earth.

Space shuttle Discovery’s astronauts steered closer to the international space station for a Sunday linkup, while checking their ship for any signs of launch damage.

The routine survey began early Saturday evening and lasted until the wee hours of Sunday.

NASA officials say no fuel tank debris was observed hitting Discovery during Friday’s midnight liftoff. But the shuttle’s most vulnerable areas — the wings and nose — still needed to be inspected with lasers and cameras on a boom attached to the robot arm. The images were beamed down for analysis.

Some of the images got held up because of a digital TV feed problem, but the early indication was that the survey results looked good.

“Nothing stood out that I saw,” said flight director Tony Ceccacci.

In addition, the shuttle’s underside will be photographed in detail by the space station residents Sunday night, right before the two craft meet.

A hole in the wing brought down Columbia six years ago. Ever since, NASA has been vigilant in seeking out indications of serious launch damage.

Discovery is loaded with supplies for the space station, now home to six astronauts. Once the seven shuttle fliers arrive, it will make for a record-tying crowd.

“It’s great to be back in space,” Discovery’s commander, Rick Sturckow, said Saturday afternoon.

“Micro G is great,” rookie astronaut Jose Hernandez noted in his first Twitter update from space. The Mexican-American grew up in a migrant worker family and applied for 12 straight years to become an astronaut, before getting picked in 2004. “Settling in and realizing my dream,” he wrote.

Discovery’s supply run will leave the space station well stocked; the shuttle is hauling about 17,000 pounds of equipment and science experiments. Six mice, part of a bone loss study, will move in for a three-month stay. So will astronaut Nicole Stott, the replacement for an astronaut who has been at the orbiting complex for more than a month.

Stott will help put together a brand new $5 million treadmill flying up on Discovery that will expand the space station’s gym. The treadmill, currently in more than 100 pieces, is named after Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. Earlier this year, he won an online vote for naming rights to a space station room, but NASA picked the name Tranquility instead and offered him the running machine.