Jammed Bolt Keeps Shuttle on Ground

A simple bolt and tricky crosswinds combined Monday to force yet another departure delay for the space shuttle Challenger and its much ballyhooed passenger, New England schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe. The setback also threatens an ambitious attempt to get a close-up look at Halley’s comet.

After the crew was already secured inside the shuttle, technicians were forced to frantically wield a hacksaw and power drill on a jammed bolt attached to the handle of a hatch.

Television monitors recorded the incident, yielding an almost comic vision of as many as six coverall-clad technicians attacking the hatch of the $1.2-billion space vehicle with the common tools of the working man.

By the time the shuttle was ready for blastoff, chill winds reached as high as 30 knots, conditions considered dangerous in the event the spacecraft should need to return to the Kennedy Space Center for an emergency landing.

“It was just not our day,” Robert Sieck, NASA launching director, said.

He said a launching would be attempted today at 6:38 a.m. PST. However, a severe overnight frost was forecast for much of Florida, which could result in another rescheduling, perhaps past Thursday.

Sandstorms in Senegal

Liftoff originally was planned for five days ago. However, the launching was affected by repeated delays in the weather-plagued mission of a sister shuttle, Columbia, along with sandstorms at an emergency landing site in Senegal and forecasts of weekend rains at prime launching times--forecasts that proved to be inaccurate.

NASA scientists said that, after Thursday, the amount of information about Halley’s comet that could be gathered by a tiny probe ejected from the shuttle would diminish.

“I just hope we get off tomorrow,” said Morgan Windsor, mission manager for the so-called Spartan-Halley probe.

The mission agenda for the seven-member crew calls also for the deployment of an important NASA tracking satellite and other studies.

Also to be taken aloft are 32 fertilized eggs, subjects of a student project to determine, among other things, whether chickens can be grown by future colonists in the last frontier. The experiment is sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Most attention, however, has been focused on McAuliffe, the 37-year-old New Hamphshire woman destined to become the first American teacher in space. The high school social science instructor was selected from thousands of applicants who responded to President Reagan’s declaration that the first private U.S. citizen in space would be an educator.