Weather Forces Delay in Shuttle Launch

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. —  NASA received a gloomy weather forecast Saturday night and postponed for 24 hours today’s scheduled launch of space shuttle Challenger with schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe as a passenger.

The outlook had been marginal all day, but shuttle managers took one more look at 7 p.m. PST and decided that chances were slim for a liftoff today.

The decision was made shortly before the launch crew was to begin loading 500,000 gallons of fuel aboard the shuttle.

The problem was a frontal system moving toward Cape Canaveral from the northwest, packing rain and thunderstorms. The launch was rescheduled for 6:37 a.m. PST Monday.

Poor weather in North Africa, the location of two emergency landing sites, had already delayed Challenger’s liftoff one day. Clouds and rain forced two of sister ship Columbia’s record seven launch postponements earlier this month.

Forecasters said the weather here should be clear Monday after the front passes through this afternoon.

Challenger’s seven crew members were briefed on the weather Saturday, studied their flight plan and underwent medical examinations.

Duties in Space

During six days in space, they are to deploy one satellite to observe Halley’s comet and another to become part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s space-based shuttle tracking network.

But the public interest is focused on McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school teacher from Concord, N.H. She was selected from 11,146 teacher applicants to be the first to fly on the shuttle in NASA’s citizen-in-space program.

From her orbiting classroom, she will teach two lessons that students in hundreds of schools will watch on Public Broadcasting Service. She also will make a demonstration film for distribution to schools after the mission.

More than 600 teachers and 4,000 students from around the country are here to watch the launching, as are McAuliffe’s attorney husband, Steve, and their two children, Scott, 9, and Caroline, 6.

McAuliffe and her crew mates--pilot Dick Scobee, co-pilot Mike Smith, Judy Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ron McNair and commercial engineer Greg Jarvis--were asleep when NASA officials made the frustrating delay decision Saturday night.

The postponement canceled plans for Vice President George Bush to watch the blastoff and disappointed thousands of spectators.

But NASA officials were taking no chance of marring a safety record that has seen 24 shuttle missions fly more than 52 million miles without a major mishap.

“We’re not going to launch this thing and take any kind of risk because we have that schedule pressure,” Jesse Moore, NASA’s chief of shuttle operations, told reporters at a pre-launch briefing. “We’re going to continue to abide by the flight rules that we’ve always established in this program and we’ll sit on the ground until we all believe it’s safe to launch.”