This story is Chapter 7 in an 11-part series by Florida Today.

CAPE CANAVERAL - Stephanie Stilson felt her team's energy jump as workers saw Discovery starting to come together.

All but dismantled during a years-long maintenance and modification period, it was starting to look like a space shuttle again. The team was almost ready for the historic return to flight.

It finally seemed the worst of the delays since the Columbia accident were behind them.

"We were on that upswing," she said. "People were thinking, 'OK, we're over the hump.' "

Then came the hurricanes. Three times in two months, workers had to stop getting ready for return to flight and start preparing for the worst. They took a shift to close the orbiter's payload bay doors. They closed the side doors and hatches. If they couldn't be closed, workers bagged them, taped the plastic up, and did whatever else they could think of to keep water out. Crews bagged the wheels and sandbagged the doors, just in case the storm pushed a surge -- or giant wave -- of water over the center.

All the while, workers were distracted. They needed to hammer up plywood or screw on shutters. They worried about their families, their homes, their trees, everything as constant TV reports advertised a seemingly imminent doomsday.

Three times, KSC Director Jim Kennedy closed the place down and sent people home to deal with their lives.

Hurricane Charley grazed the space
center first, after steamrolling across the state from west to east in August, initiating Florida's fiercest storm season on record.

The worst, for Florida's East Coast, was to come. Frances and Jeanne aimed right at Brevard.

Kennedy Space Center stood directly in Frances' path as a stubborn high pressure ridge pushed the violent hurricane westward across the Atlantic Ocean.

It was beginning to look like a Category 4 storm, a monster capable of utter devastation.

Like most others, Stilson evacuated. She went to Fort Myers. Armando Oliu, a KSC colleague working on return to flight, sent his wife, Jennifer, and daughter, Victoria, off to visit friends in Tennessee.

A member of the team of workers who would be first back on the center to assess the storm's damage, Oliu couldn't go far. He opted for Sarasota, far enough to avoid Frances, but close enough to get back.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER Frances hammers KSC, leaves shuttles unharmed

Frances came ashore farther south than expected, at Hutchinson Island, but it stretched its spiraling arms hundreds of miles. It ripped holes in people's roofs, chewed at the beaches and lashed eastern Florida with high winds and tornadoes.

The outer walls of the gargantuan Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC, where space shuttle orbiters are stacked with solid rocket boosters and the fuel tank before launch, began to come apart.

Over the years, steel fasteners interacted with aluminum wall panels, the rain and salty air, creating miniature batteries.

The resulting corrosion ate away at the holes. Gusts up to 94 mph had no problem popping off the big metal panels. They twisted as they flew through the air, taking out cars on the ground and smashing into nearby buildings.

No one was there to see it.

Frances looked so dangerous as it approached that the KSC ride-out team decided not to live up to its name. Fearful of deadly storm surge, the crew hid out not at the Launch Control Center, but at locations across the county and beyond.

"It was an uneasy feeling locking the gate and leaving, because we had never done that before," said NASA's Michael Stevens, who acted as emergency preparedness officer during the storm while his wife and two children evacuated to Georgia.

A direct hit by a Category 4 storm could destroy the buildings that house the orbiters. The space center shut down by Sept. 3.

Although winds at KSC never reached sustained hurricane strength, the slow clobbering by Category 2 Frances was enough.

Stevens waited out the storm at Brevard County's Emergency Operations Center in Rockledge. As the painstakingly slow-moving Frances battered most of the county, Stevens could only wonder if there would be any shuttles, launch pads or even a space program to go back to.

When the weather settled, Stevens joined a caravan of about 50 people and drove out to the space center.

From miles away, the picture looked grim. They could see gaping holes in the façade of the VAB, some opened all the way through the walls. But none of the flight hardware inside was ruined.

A computer control center was damaged and the building where workers make heat-shield tiles and blankets lost its roof. In the tile facility, workers looked up and saw the sky. Stevens thought they were lucky.

The factory's destruction would mean more delays, but there was still a space program. Snug in their hangars, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis survived undamaged. "You felt like you had a shot at getting back to the launching business," he said.

LAUNCH COMPLEX 39 Storms cause damage, weeks of delays

Around the space center, Frances left scars. A pile of twisted metal from the VAB's walls, which lost more than 50,000 square feet in panels, lay in a nearby parking lot.

Pieces of faded red recalled the enormous flag mural of which they had once been part. Inside, things weren't so bad. The roof leaked, but most things appeared in decent shape.

The worst was the tile factory. Upstairs, where the staff once sewed thermal blankets for the orbiter, insulation hung over scattered pieces of high-tech fabric. Ancient sewing machines seized from rain and salt air.

"I always wanted to get skylights in here," said Martin Wilson, who works for shuttle contractor United Space Alliance as the head of the thermal-protection operation. "At least we know what it would look like."

The mess made Kathy Evans want to cry. Instead, she and her colleagues dug into the debris and pulled out whatever pieces might save them -- paperwork, patterns, fabric, tools, buttons.

Before Hurricane Jeanne would hit, the blanket operation moved to a hangar next to the shuttle landing strip. Technicians fixed the sewing machines. Workers matched identifying paperwork with the unique cloth pieces that tuck into crevices of the orbiters. The thermal protection team lost three weeks of work, but the technicians were still sewing.

The tile-production factory was stripped of wet walls and dried out with hot-air blowers. Workers lost 10 days, but avoided sending work to California. Wilson greeted the prospects of the next storm, Jeanne, cheerfully.

"We've been kind of pre-disastered up to the 90-mile-an-hour level," he said. "Any winds less than that aren't going to do anything."

COCOA Hardened workers ready for Jeanne, not delays

Stilson came back after Frances to find a tree had ripped out power lines and equipment on the side of her house in west Cocoa. By the time Jeanne approached a few weeks later, she and the KSC crew were old hands at getting ready -- at work and home.

Stilson hired a contractor to pre-cut some trees in her yard this time. She was inside her house when she heard a crash. "Oh, no," she thought. "Do I even want to go look?"

A tree had fallen the wrong way, onto her garage. The damage wasn't too bad. She and her roommate had the house patched up, and Stilson went to St. Petersburg for her sister's engagement party during the storm.

The Olius did what a lot of evacuation-weary Brevardians tried for Jeanne. They stuck it out at home in Rockledge.

"I probably wouldn't do that again," he said. "I was too worried about the house."

If something had happened to the house, his wife and daughter would have been his priority anyway, not the house or belongings.

As the wind howled, he thought, "What am I doing here, anyway? I'm not going out there and plywood the house and get hurt, and then what will they do?"

At KSC, Emergency Preparedness Officer Wayne Kee and the ride-out crew endured Jeanne in the Launch Control Center. There, NASA and Air Force officials, security workers and weather forecasters eyeballed cameras monitoring the storm's glancing blow on the Cape.

"Until it got dark dark, you could see things like pieces of metal flying off the VAB, just all kind of things flowing, blowing and rolling," Kee said.

Fortunately, Frances hadn't left a lot for Jeanne to blow away.

Powerless again at home, Stilson borrowed a generator to keep her two big fish tanks working.

Then she had to face the reality at work. There was damage, but nothing more devastating than Frances. The real impact: missed work days. They'd lost too much work time to the freak weather -- four to five weeks.

There was no way to get Discovery ready to roll when planned. "Same type of thing could happen if we had a hardware delivery slip," she said. "You just go in and you say, 'Now, what do I do to recover from that?' "

Kennedy workers are used to making up lost time. It's not unusual for them to turn half-finished pieces into flight-worthy hardware, making last-minute changes along the way.

"When you're where the rubber meets the road, you get all those final challenges that everyone else has been putting off," she said. Still, people were discouraged. Discovery's launch slipped from March to May.

"I want to get flying," Stilson said. "If I could fly tomorrow, then I'd be happy to do that. But they also know and understand that it has to be done the right way."

Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2005 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.

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