Nevertheless, the Athena launch team is pressing ahead, hoping the winds will remain calm, the clouds won't be too low or too thick and the temperature will remain warm enough.

"We'd like to give it a try, given that we still do have 10 percent favorable conditions," Chuck Dovale, a NASA launch manager from the Kennedy Space Center who is overseeing this mission, said Thursday during a press conference on Kodiak Island.

Originally targeted to fly Aug. 31, the so-called Kodiak Star mission was bumped two weeks because of a technical problem that had to be fixed, and then was further delayed by the atrocious attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11 because members of the launch team on their way to Alaska were stranded by the grounded airlines.

Dovale said the team of nearly 140 people needed time to regroup, make sure everyone was safe and that they could safely fly to Alaska. Shocked by the national events and perhaps not wanting to be so far from home, the team also had to decide if they still wanted to go through with the mission.

"It was a personal decision (by) all the individuals," Dovale said. "It was unanminious that people wanted to see this through and wanted to come up here and launch this, and just show what we're made of."

The $38 million mission is expected to take about two hours and will see the three-stage rocket flying a roller-coaster-shaped track through the sky before all four satellites are deployed into orbit.

Initially the upper stage of the Athena 1 booster will loft itself and its payload into an orbit 500 miles (800 kilometers) high, where the three Air Force-sponsored spacecraft -- two are student projects while the third holds science experiments for the Defense Department -- are to be released between 64 and 71 minutes after launch.

Then comes the stomach-falling sensation as the Athena upper stage flips around and fires its engine in a braking maneuver that will drop the orbit down to 290 miles (470 kilometers), where the NASA-sponsored Starshine 3 spacecraft is to be deployed almost two hours and 10 minutes after launch.

Essentially a ball about one yard (one meter) in diameter and covered with hundreds of small mirrors, Starshine 3 is proving disco isn't dead as it streaks across the sky and is designed to be seen by schoolchildren around the world in an attempt to teach orbital mechanics and spacecraft tracking systems to students.

One previous Starshine satellite was released from a space shuttle, but because of the position of its orbit many kids in the most northern and southern portions of Earth couldn't see the mirrored-ball fly overhead. Two more Starshine payloads are scheduled for launch from shuttles next year.

By launching into a polar orbit from Alaska, "this satellite will pass over every child in the world," said Gil Moore, director of the Starshine program. "Now there's not a child in the world that can't see this satellite."

If the launch is successful, Alaska will join Florida, California and Virginia as the only states that have hosted rockets to be launched into Earth orbit.

Three Air Force missiles were launched between 1998 and 2001 on sub-orbital missions from the Alaskan site -- which is located about 250 miles south of Anchorage -- but the Kodiak Star mission is to be the first into orbit.