10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

unprecedented hearing was scheduled just a few days before the launch, which had originally been planned for 12 October.

For weeks, the protesters had been out in force, demon- strating and seizing media attention. Things had become very heated. On Saturday, 7 October, sign-wielding activists fitted themselves out with gas masks and walked around on street corners in nearby Cape Canaveral in protest. At 8 a.m. on Monday, 9 October, NASA started the countdown for the Thursday blast-off. But as Atlantis’s clock began ticking toward take-off, activists from the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice demonstrated at the centre's tourist complex.

That these protests had already taken some of the shine off NASA's bold space mission was the least of the agency's worries. The real headache was that the Florida Coalition told the media it would ‘put people on the launchpad in a non- violent protest’.² The coalition's director, Bruce Gagnon, put the threat in folksy terms, portraying the protesters as the little people rebelling against a big bad government agency. President Jeremy Rivkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends, another protest group, also drove a wedge between ‘the people’ and ‘NASA's people’. He told UPI, ‘The astronauts volunteered for this mission. Those around the world who may be the victims of radiation contamination have not volunteered.’³

But the protesters weren't the only people working the media. NASA knew how to handle the press. They simply rolled out their superstars — the astronauts themselves. These men and women were, after all, frontier heroes who dared to venture into cold, dark space on behalf of all humanity. Atlantis commander Donald Williams didn't hit out at the protesters in a blunt fashion, he just damned them from an aloof distance. ‘There are always folks who have a vocal opinion about some- thing or other, no matter what it is,’ he told an interviewer. ‘On the other hand, it’s easy to carry a sign. It's not so easy to go forth and do something worthwhile.’⁴

NASA had another trump card in the families of the heroes. Atlantis co-pilot Michael McCulley said the use of RTGs,