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LOUIS Friedman, one-time rocket scientist and now, as head of the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, one of the nation's most vocal cheerleaders for planetary exploration, had waited a long time for this moment and wanted to savor it in solitude. Launches always made him nervous, but this one, on a morning last April, was special. If it worked, it would mark the end of more than a decade of waiting for the United States to return to planetary exploration. If it didn't, it would be just another on a list of disappointments NASA has handed to Friedman in the past 17 years.
He moved a few feet from his friends among the crowd of spectators at Cape Canaveral and positioned himself in clear view of the launch pad. Then he stared into the distance at the space shuttle Atlantis, which was scheduled momentarily to take the spacecraft Magellan into Earth orbit and then send it on its way to Venus.
As a 31-year-old engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1972, Friedman's first supervisory job was study leader and program manager for the then-unnamed Magellan project. Had anyone told him then that he would be a grandfather by the time Magellan flew, he wouldn't have believed them. But since the mid-1970s, he had gradually become disillusioned with the false starts and delays in the American space program.
This day, he had flown from California to Florida to watch the launch and take part in a panel discussion, a sort of celebration of America's return to space exploration. Standing alone at the edge of the crowd as the countdown entered its last minute, he half expected another delay. An optimist about most things, he had never had much faith in the wisdom of using the space shuttle instead of conventional rockets to launch spacecraft.
At T-minus 30 seconds, the countdown stopped. A malfunction had been detected; the shuttle engines shut down. Friedman was disappointed, and he couldn't help but immediately see the irony.
"When that thing didn't go, and I was looking out from the causeway, I could also see a Titan (rocket) the Air Force was getting ready for another launch," he recalls a few weeks later. "Boy, did I wish we were using that."
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