CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The seven astronauts who fearlessly got NASA and its space shuttles flying again are still marveling over the world’s passionate reaction to their safe return.

In the 1.5 weeks since Discovery delivered them back to the planet, commander Eileen Collins and her crew have been swamped with e-mails, phone messages and interview requests. They have been hailed as heroes by their colleagues and the president, and heard from long-out-of-touch relatives and friends, even total strangers.

Perhaps most touching, they have been in close contact with the families of the seven astronauts killed aboard Columbia and visited with the commander’s deeply religious widow and her two children. Collins e-mailed the Columbia families from orbit.

“She was praying for us — everybody was praying for us,” Collins said in an interview with The Associated Press last week from Houston. “That’s another reason I knew we were safe.”

It turned out to be one dramatic, roller coaster of a flight.

In a frightening deja vu, a potentially catastrophic three-foot section of insulating foam tore off Discovery’s fuel tank during liftoff July 26. It fell away without striking the shuttle. Oversized pieces of foam came off the redesigned tank in four other spots.

Then two strips of filler material were found dangling from Discovery’s belly, a defect that could have led to a Columbia-type disaster during re-entry. The pieces were removed in an unprecedented spacewalk. Then a thermal blanket beneath a cockpit window was found to be ripped, posing a potential debris hazard for descent.

Collins said the prospect of a fourth spacewalk to remove the torn blanket worried her, more than anything else on the flight. Her crew was weary — the two-week mission was nearing an end — and it would have meant a rush to learn new, unfamiliar procedures. NASA concluded that the blanket was safe for the ride home.

It was the foam, though, that had the astronauts in disbelief.

Collins’ co-pilot, James Kelly, was angry that everyone, himself included, had missed it as a threat and done nothing to fix that part of the external fuel tank.

Because of Discovery’s foam loss, space shuttles are grounded until at least next March.