Space shuttle Endeavour lands in California

The space shuttle Endeavour, carried piggyback atop a jumbo jet, landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Friday at the tail end of a cross-country trip to Los Angeles to begin its final mission as a museum exhibit.

The specially modified Boeing 747 with the newly retired spaceship perched on its back touched down safely at 12.50pm (local time) at Edwards, about 160km north of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert.

Nasa retired its shuttle fleet last year after completing the US portion of the US$100 billion International Space Station, a permanently staffed research complex that is owned by 15 nations and orbits about 400km above Earth.

Endeavour embarked on its last cross-county “ferry” journey on Wednesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and made several low-altitude passes over NASA centres in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas before stopping for the night at Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The trip resumed early on Thursday, with Endeavour and its carrier jet making additional flyovers - one over Tucson, Arizona, in a salute to former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut who commanded Endeavour’s final flight on his last mission in late May last year.

Giffords, still recuperating from a gunshot wound to the head suffered in an attempt on her life last year, watched the flyover from the roof of a Tucson parking garage with her husband and mother, according to former aide C.J. Karamargin, who joined them.