Disasters Leave ‘Space Coast’ Deeply Scarred and Angry

When a half-dozen out-of-town reporters were eating dinner at the Catfish Inn on U.S. Route 1 here after the loss of a Delta rocket a week ago, their seemingly flippant comments on NASA’s latest failure were like salt in the wounds of four burly, rough-looking men at a nearby table.

“You want me to take care of them?” one of the men snarled under his breath to a companion as he cracked his fists.

“Naw, Ed, you stay put,” the other replied. “I’ll do it. You’re still on parole.”

Waitress Intervenes

Only the quiet intervention of a kindly waitress spared the reporters from being taught a tough lesson.

If the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger broke the hearts of Florida’s “Space Coast” communities, then the destruction of a Delta rocket a week ago has torn them out and stomped them flat.

The pain runs deep. Feelings are easily rubbed raw, and tempers are often on a short fuse.

“It’s pure agony around here,” said Carol Mangan, manager of a convenience store near the Kennedy Space Center, expressing an almost universally felt sentiment.

Three months ago, the communities of the Space Coast--a diverse collection of cities and towns stretching for more than 100 miles along the middle of Florida’s Atlantic Coast--were riding high. The shuttle program was in full swing, and the prospects for the future were good.

Then came the destruction of Challenger on Jan. 28, followed by the disintegration of the unmanned Delta rocket on May 3. In between, a Titan rocket exploded after liftoff at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

“We were still in shock from Challenger when these others hit,” said Jim Brown, vice mayor of Titusville, the seat of Brevard County in the heartland of the Space Coast. “You think, ‘Oh, my God, when is it going to stop.’ ”

The pain is evident everywhere.

“This whole region is like one big company town and, when NASA hurts, all of us hurt,” Hans Unger, a Melbourne restaurant owner, said.

At a bar in trendy Cocoa Beach, an engineer from McDonnell Douglas, builder of the Delta rocket, could recently be heard muttering repeatedly to a companion as if in shock: “We can’t go on like this . . . . We can’t go on like this . . . . NASA has got to get back into business soon.”

Layoffs after the Challenger disaster, along with dropping tourism, are already hurting the area’s economy.

In January, the month of the shuttle disaster, the jobless rate for Brevard County was 4.9%, compared to the statewide average of 5.6%. In March, the latest month for which statistics are available, the county’s rate had soared to 6.3%--an increase of more than 28%--while the state average edged up slightly to 5.8%.

“We were doing a lot of $600 weddings,” a florist at a Cocoa Beach flower shop said. “Now we’re doing a lot of $200 weddings.”

Work Force Cut

At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the area’s biggest single employer, the 16,000-member work force has been cut in recent months by 1,100. Officials are hoping to hold the total percentage of layoffs to under 10%, but whether they can remains unclear.

This is not the first time the region has been devastated by tragedy. In 1967, after the deaths of three Apollo astronauts in a launching pad fire, the moon rocket program was shut down for nearly two years.

“We recovered from that, and we’ll recover from this,” Titusville Vice Mayor Brown said. “There’s a lot of depression, but we’ve had more successes than failures in the space program, and there’s no reason to believe that we won’t be back in business sooner or later.”