They had previously taken off on Monday, July 2, 2007, from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Atlantis and its Boeing jet  landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:27 a.m. EDT.

Flying with the Orbiter on top of it makes for more fuel usage on the Boeing 747 jumbo jet because of extra drag. Its range is diminished to just over 1,000 nautical miles (1,900 kilometers), compared to an empty range of about 5,500 nautical miles (10,000 kilometers).

Thus, the NASA Boeing jet, called the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), requires several stops to refuel on a flight from the western part of the United States, either California or New Mexico, to the eastern coast of Florida.

The SCA has an altitude ceiling of 25,000 feet and a maximum cruising speed of 0.7 mach (about 530 miles per hour), with or without the orbiter on top of it. The SCA-Shuttle pair travels about 125 feet per U.S. gallon of fuel, or approximately 0.024 miles/gallon. It takes a crew of approximately 170 persons about one week to prepare the shuttle and SCA for flight. Each trip across the country costs about $1.7 million to NASA.

{moscomment}