UNDERGROUND

Wednesday, 18 October 1989 Kennedy Space Center, Florida

The five-member Atlantis team had some bad news on Wednes- day morning. The weather forecasters gave the launch site a 40 per cent chance of launch guideline-violating rain and cloud. And then there was the earthquake in California.

The Kennedy Space Center wasn't the only place which had to be in tip-top working order for a launch to go ahead. The launch depended on many sites far away from Florida. These included Edwards Air Force Base in California, where the shuttle was due to land on Monday. They also included other sites, often military bases, which were essential for shuttle tracking and other mission support. One of these sites was a tracking station at Onizuka Air Force Base at Sunnyvale, California. The earthquake which ripped through the Bay area had damaged the tracking station and senior NASA decision- makers planned to meet on Wednesday morning to consider the Sunnyvale situation. Still, the space agency maintained a calm, cool exterior. Regardless of the technical problems, the court challenges and the protesters, the whimsical weather, the natural disasters, and the WANK worm, NASA was still in control of the situation.

'There's been some damage, but we don't know how much. The sense I get is it's fairly positive,' a NASA spokesman told UPI. 'But there are some problems.'15 In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Rick Oborn reassured the public again, 'They are going to be able to handle shuttle tracking and support for the mission . . . They will be able to do their job'.16

Atlantis waited, ready to go, at launchpad 39B. The tech- nicians had filled the shuttle up with rocket fuel and it looked as if the weather might hold. It was partly cloudy, but condi- tions at Kennedy passed muster.

The astronauts boarded the shuttle. Everything was in place. But while the weather was acceptable in Florida, it was causing some problems in Africa, the site of an emergency