Quadruple Whammy

They brought all the trappings of a teen slumber party: sleeping bags, favorite pillows and junk food. But the night of Sept. 25 was far from a sleepover for 225 civilian and military members of the launch corps at historic Cape Canaveral, Fla. They spent it inside the space shuttle Launch Control Center and some other mission-critical facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, under attack from a hurricane.

Built to take blastoff vibrations from the mighty Saturn 5 moon rockets of the Apollo era, the Launch Control Center is the safest refuge at Cape Canaveral. Knowing it also stands up in a 150-mph hurricane made the apprehension no less electric for Brig. Gen. Select Mark Owen, commander of the 45th Space Wing at neighboring Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, one of two novices on the ride-out crew. "We set up cots in the hallways with little intention of getting any real sleep," Owen recalls. "There was a lot of uncertainty in our minds about what we were going to face." Winds howled for 20 hours. It was 5 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 26, when Hurricane Jeanne made her way inside and caught the other newbie, space center Director James Kennedy, dozing. Water intrusion alarms sounded, he says, "and we all got a shocking wake-up call."

Similar scenes played out four times in 45 days during this year's Atlantic tropical cyclone season. Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne spared America's space shuttle fleet and several unmanned rockets, but took a costly toll on launch support facilities in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. A training center for naval aviators in the Florida Panhandle took a heavy blow from one storm Sept. 16. Aircraft were flown away from Naval Air Station Pensacola to safe shelters before Ivan roared ashore. But 90 percent of the large base's buildings were damaged. At least 21 of them are in such bad shape, they will have to be demolished. "It looks like a war zone," says Harry White, a spokesman for several Navy installations in the Gulf Coast region. Many civilians were told not to report to work for nearly two weeks because of power outages on the base.

NASA blames work time lost to storms-16 days at the Kennedy Space Center alone-for delaying the space shuttle's return to flight from early March 2005 until at least May 14. NASA's Space Flight Leadership Council planned to spend the month of October assessing how its plan to launch Discovery on the first mission since the Columbia disaster will be affected by damage to shuttle infrastructure located across the storm-ravaged southeastern United States.

While many government workers and contractors try to cope with the harm besetting their homes and families, leaders of the civilian and military aviation and space programs in Florida are pondering how to make adequate repairs with limited budgets. President Bush's $12.2 billion hurricane relief request includes $889 million for storm-related expenses at military bases. The Air Force still is adding up its costs at Cape Canaveral and Patrick Air Force Base, according to a 45th Space Wing spokesman. But Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., worries repairs at Pensacola will be so expensive-as much as $1 billion-that the base will be targeted for closure. Nelson expressed his concern at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Sept. 23. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the suggestion at the same hearing, saying he would support rebuilding.

NASA got a speedy, $126 million supplemental appropriation from Congress to cover hurricane costs, but a full accounting of the damage to the space center's 900 facilities is expected to take weeks or months.

The hurricanes' fury is symbolized in photographs of the space center's 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building, a landmark structure built in 1965 to house Apollo moon rockets under construction. Although the building was designed to withstand 125 mph winds, 94-mph Frances and weaker sister Jeanne managed to tear away 850 corrugated steel panels-a total of 54,400 square feet of siding-to expose a large portion of its 129.4 million cubic feet to the elements. The roof was in danger of collapsing. Fortunately, the remaining three of NASA's $2 billion orbiters were parked in their hangars and a $12.3 million roof refurbishment, just contracted for in August, had not begun.

About 800 of the 14,000 federal and contractor employees at the coastal launch complex were displaced. Besides ripping out new windows in the Vehicle Assembly Building, Frances destroyed the factory where the shuttle's heat-resistant tile skin is made. Frances rendered a computer center uninhabitable, and Jeanne swamped all five floors of a building that houses space payloads and visiting astronauts. "The combination of Charley, Frances and Jeanne leaves us with a great deal of repair work in the coming months and we will do that," Kennedy told reporters in late September.

Air Force facilities at Cape Canaveral and nearby Patrick Air Force Base took their worst beating from Jeanne. Support infrastructure, such as a hangar that provides storage and office space for tenant organizations at Patrick, took the hardest hits. Except for the Air Force's version of NASA's assembly building-a vertical integration facility for unmanned rockets-major facilities and systems had little or no apparent damage. Three unmanned rockets remained unscathed inside protective gantries at their seaside launch pads. It was not clear by early October how the hurricanes might have affected sensitive electronic equipment at radar tracking stations along the ocean corridor known as the Eastern Range, where the Air Force monitors missile tests, rocket launches and space shuttle flights to safeguard the public.

The spate of storms exposed weaknesses in the government's maintenance programs. Owen told reporters that some 40-year-old Air Force facilities "are not showing their best sides" since Frances and Jeanne "knocked the paint and powder" off them. Pending a shift from heritage Atlas, Delta and Titan rockets to a new family of launch vehicles, the Air Force is left to decide whether to bring the damaged facilities back up to par or to abandon them for new ones. The 45th Space Wing got $33 million from the Pentagon for repairs after Hurricane Frances-not enough for any significant structural updates.

NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building was showing its age before the hurricanes. A leaky roof and corroding structural steel are perennial concerns that NASA rarely has had sufficient funds to address. In the past three years, the Kennedy Space Center has initiated more than $40 million worth of Vehicle Assembly Building repair projects, but these amount to a fraction of the need projected in a December 2002 RAND Corp. study of options for privatizing the shuttle program.

The building could be in the critical path for shuttle Discovery's launch as soon as November, when the ship's external fuel tank is scheduled to be delivered and attached to its two solid-fuel booster rockets inside the structure. The assembly building was functioning with temporary patches in mid-October, but Director Kennedy predicts repairs will take up to a year. "The money we're talking about will not allow us to start over and build new buildings that have better hurricane protection, but we will . . . use it wisely to reinforce the buildings as best we can," Kennedy told reporters.