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'.3 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.'4
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.
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