Cape Canavarel, Fla. ? NASA decided Thursday that no repairs are needed for a deep gouge in Endeavour’s belly and that the space shuttle is safe to fly home.

Mission Control notified the seven shuttle astronauts of the decision right before they went to sleep, putting an end to a week of engineering analyses and anxious uncertainty – both in orbit and on Earth.

Endeavour’s relieved commander, Scott Kelly, thanked everyone on the ground for their hard work. Mission Control replied, “It’s great we finally have a decision and we can press forward.”

After meeting for five hours, mission managers opted Thursday night against any risky spacewalk repairs based on the overwhelming – but not unanimous – recommendations of hundreds of engineers. The massive amount of data indicated Endeavour would suffer no serious structural damage during next week’s re-entry.

Their worry was not that Endeavour might be destroyed and its seven astronauts killed in a replay of the Columbia disaster; the gouge is too small to be catastrophic. They were concerned that the heat of re-entry could weaken the shuttle’s aluminum frame at the damaged spot and result in lengthy postflight repairs.

The chairman of the mission management team, John Shannon, said Johnson Space Center’s engineering group in Houston wanted to proceed with the repairs. But everyone else, including safety officials, voted to skip them.

“I am 100 percent comfortable that the work that has been done has accurately characterized it (the damage) and that we will have a very successful re-entry,” Shannon said.

“I am also 100 percent confident that if we would have gotten a different answer and found out that this was something that was going to endanger the lives of the crew, that we had the capability on board to go and repair it and then have a successful entry,” he said.

Endeavour’s bottom thermal shielding was pierced by a piece of debris that broke off the external fuel tank shortly after liftoff last week. The debris, either foam insulation, ice or a combination of both, weighed one-third of an ounce but packed enough punch to carve out a 3 1/2-inch-long, 2-inch-wide gouge and dig all the way through the thermal tiles. Left completely exposed was a narrow 1-inch strip of the overlying felt fabric, the last barrier before the shuttle’s aluminum structure.