The space shuttle Atlantis was again delayed from returning to its home base on Saturday for the second day in a row because of thunderstorms. The thunderstorms also kept the astronauts circling Earth after a successful repair job at the Hubble Space Telescope. The offshore storms prompted NASA to skip both morning landing attempts at Kennedy Space Center. Despite an equally bad forecast for Sunday, Mission Control said they would wait for the bad weather to pass and detour to California. A cooling-system problem cropped up aboard Atlantis shortly after Mission Control informed the astronauts of the latest landing plans. Commander Scott Altman and his crew were instructed to hold off on opening the payload bay doors just in case an emergency return was required. Within minutes, however, the astronauts were assured that everything appeared to be working normally. This was the fifth and final visit to Hubble by astronauts. With NASA's three remaining space shuttles slated for retirement next year, there will be no way to stage another repair mission at the space telescope. It will be steered into the Pacific sometime in the early 2020s; a docking ring was installed by Atlantis' astronauts just for that purpose.
