Florida:
Space shuttle Endeavour and its six astronauts returned to Earth on Wednesday, ending the next-to-last mission in NASA's 30-year programme with a safe landing in the middle of the night.
Bright lights illuminated the landing strip for the shuttle crew, who made the 25th night landing out of a total of 134 shuttle flights.
Commander Mark Kelly brought Endeavour to a stop before hundreds of onlookers that included the four astronauts who will take flight in July on Atlantis, the last ever shuttle to go up in space.
"It's great to bring Endeavour back in great shape, it looks like it's ready to go do another mission, but this is going to be the last flight," Kelly said after the landing on Wednesday.
The Endeavour astronauts - all experienced spacemen - departed the International Space Station over the weekend, after adding the finishing touches to the outpost.
Their flight lasted 16 days and, with a series of four spacewalks, completed NASA's role in the space station construction effort that began 12 years ago.
The official tally for NASA's youngest shuttle after 25 flights, nearly half of them to the space station: 170 crew members, 299 days in space and 4,672 orbits of Earth, and 122.8 million miles.
Kelly was the last astronaut to exit Endeavour.
He and his crew posed for pictures and signed autographs on the runway.
Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff was so wobbly from weightlessness that he had to be supported by two colleagues, but he was determined to join in the event.
The crew installed a two billion US dollar (1.38 billion euro) cosmic ray detector, an extension beam and a platform full of spare parts, enough to keep the station operating in the shuttle-less decade ahead.
"We have the station positioned to where, over the next 10-15-20 years, it has the spare parts it needs to continue doing the science that is so relevant today," Kelly said.
Kelly's wife, representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head during a mass shooting in January, did not travel to Florida for the landing.
Having made a remarkable recovery, she was able to attend the launch on 16 May and intends to reunite with her husband in Houston on Thursday.
Endeavour is the second shuttle to be retired.
It ultimately will be at the California Science Centre in Los Angeles.
Built to replace the destroyed Challenger, the space ship first soared in 1992 on a satellite-rescue mission that saw a record-setting three spacewalkers grab the wayward craft.
Its final journey featured four spacewalks, the last ones to be conducted by a shuttle crew.
The flight also marked the first departure of a Russian Soyuz capsule during a shuttle visit to the space station, and the first call to space by a pope.
Endeavour glided down onto the runway one final time on Wednesday, just as Atlantis, the last shuttle bound for space, arrived at the launch pad for the grand finale in five weeks.
Moving Atlantis to the launch pad as Endeavour landed helped temper the sadness so many are feeling with one mission remaining, officials said.
Thousands of more layoffs loom once the shuttle program ends.
"It's been a heck of a month in the last four hours," observed launch manager Mike Moses, "and I think we've used up our overtime budget for the entire month."
NASA is leaving the Earth-to-orbit business behind to focus on expeditions to asteroids and Mars.
Private companies hope to pick up the slack for cargo and crew hauls to the space station.
But it will be a while following Atlantis' upcoming flight, at least three years, by one estimate, before astronauts ride on American rockets again.