According to a statement by NASA officials, rain showers and brisk winds at Florida's Kennedy Space Center landing site deterred the Discovery space shuttle from its scheduled touchdown on Thursday.

Though the flight directors made two attempts to go through with the landing, bad weather played spoilsport, leaving the astronauts aboard Discovery, returning from a 13- day supplies' delivery mission at the International Space Station, circling the globe for at least one more day!

Before deciding to abandon Discovery's landing attempts for the day, Mission Control radioed to the space shuttle - "Just doesn't look like it's coming together for us"; to which Shuttle Commander Rick Sturckow replied: "We know that everybody worked it as hard as they could, and we'll look forward to trying again."

Discovery, which has enough supplies to remain in orbit till Sunday, will make another landing attempt on Friday at 5:48 p. m. However, going by the meteorological forecast, the weather conditions are likely to worsen, with a slight improvement expected on Saturday.

In fact, by late Thursday, flight director Richard Jones decided to call up Edwards Air Force Base in South California - the backup landing site for Discovery - for the next go-around, saying that if the weather in Florida does not improve, the shuttle will be redirected to Edwards. This cross-country ferry tour would imply an additional $1.7 million cost for NASA!