NASA's
Florida spaceport stood all but empty Monday, with only an emergency crew watching
over space shuttles and planetary probes while winds from Hurricane Wilma howled
outside.
The space agency
closed its Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral as Hurricane
Wilma struck southwest Florida. By 11:00 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) today, the storm
had weakened to a Category 2 hurricane - down from Category 3 at landfall -
with maximum winds near 105 miles per hour (165 kilometers per hour).
At KSC,
where most of NASA's 13,000 spaceport workers were advised to stay home, sustained
winds were blowing at about 57 miles per hour (91 kilometers per hour) - or
about 50 knots - with heavy rain and stronger winds expected before 2:00
p.m. EDT (1800 GMT), KSC officials said.
"It's a
very rainy day here," said NASA's George Diller, a KSC spokesperson, in a
telephone interview. "We can't see that it's gotten into anything yet."
A tornado,
one of several spawned by Hurricane Wilma, touched down near KSC, but did not
appear to damage the spaceport.
"Fortunately
it's not moving toward any of our facilities," Diller said of the twister.
A small
crew watched over NASA's three space shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour
- which sat in their hangars with their payload doors closed to protect against
leaks, KSC officials said.
"There are
no leaks in the hangars and the doors are sandbagged," Diller said, adding that
NASA's New
Horizons Pluto probe is safely stowed in its transportation canister. "The
Pluto spacecraft is doing fine."
Hurricane
Wilma is the latest storm to force the closure of a NASA facility.
In
September, NASA evacuated
its Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas as Hurricane Rita approached
the western Gulf Coast. NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, in New Orleans,
Louisiana, and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi also hunkered down during
that storm.
Michoud,
which builds the external tanks for NASA's space shuttles, and Stennis were also
damaged in
late August by Hurricane Katrina, which decimated the city of New Orleans and
the Mississippi coast.
KSC
officials said they expect the spaceport to reopen Tuesday after Hurricane
Wilma has passed.
advertisement
