Tears in the rain

Torrential rain, thunder and lightening made for an atrocious day at Kennedy Space Center today. Rain doused the Space Shuttle orbiter and two lightning bolts struck on or nearby the launch pad.

Officials said a preliminary assessment found no major problems or systems affected and while additional data reviews were planned, engineers did not expect to need any time-consuming system re-tests.

Forecasters predicted a 70 percent chance of stormy weather triggering a launch delay tomorrow, though the forecast improves slightly to 60 percent ‘no go’ Saturday and then to 40 percent on Sunday.

"Weather is not looking good for launch," shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters told reporters during a morning briefing.

"As you can see outside, the clouds have rolled in, we're starting to see some showers. We even had a thunderstorm show up this morning. So we are expecting more of this for the next couple of days."

The appalling conditions didn’t prevent NASA going ahead with the retraction of the Rotating Service Structure protecting Atlantis on launch pad 39A. It began rolling back at 2:38 pm, about 30 minutes later than planned.

Rain was pounding KSC at the time and a couple of hundred media photographers, including myself, were drenched as we waited in the open for security checks before being bused out to the launch pad to see the Shuttle.

With temperatures in the mid-80s Fahrenheit it was steamy and humid as we viewed Atlantis from the crawler-way which leads up to the launch pad. As well as the media the mosquitos were out in force.

A three hour tanking operation to fill the giant external tank with fuel was scheduled to begin at 2 am Friday morning after an assessment of the weather conditions by mission managers.

Enterprise visits Stansted

One of the most exciting assignments I was ever given as a young local newspaper reporter back in the early 1980s was to cover the visit to Stansted airport of the Space Shuttle Enterprise, riding piggyback on its 747 carrier aircraft.

It was in the early days of the Space Shuttle programme and NASA had flown Enterprise round Europe as a PR stunt, accompanied by the commander of the first ever flight John Young who, with Bob Crippen, had flown the orbiter’s maiden voyage on 12 April 1981.

The stop-off on a Sunday afternoon at Stansted airport north of London attracted thousands of people eager like myself to catch a glimpse of the new spaceship.

Strictly speaking it was not ‘local’ news for the Lincolnshire Free Press/Spalding Guardian weekly newspapers - but my Editor David Young knew it would attract many visitors from our area and was astute enough not to curb a young hack’s enthusiasm.

As a newly qualified reporter with a mainstay diet of local courts, councils and police work I could hardly of dreamed that the 80 mile trip to Stansted would sow the seeds for a career that would one day take me to many of the iconic space centres of the world, including Kennedy Space Center (KSC) itself to witness the countdown and launch of Space Shuttles.

The piece I wrote for the Lincolnshire Free Press — in those days a traditional broadsheet paper owned by East Midlands Allied Press (EMAP) — reflected the optimism surrounding the fledgling Shuttle programme.

Dr Hans Mark, deputy director of NASA at the time, predicted that by the mid-1990s there would be almost one Shuttle mission per week and that before the end of the century several thousand people would have flown in space.

Of course, in the end things didn’t quite turn out quite as he and many others had predicted.

So, some 28 years later, after collecting my press badges and passing through security on a sultry July morning, I find myself driving up the long approach road to NASA’s KSC.

The giant Vehicle Assembly Building dominates the view ahead and round the corner somewhere a Space Shuttle stands on launch pad 39A ready to make history.