Friday, November 15 New York City Times NASA SCRUBS MISSION: HACKERS AT PLAY? by Scott Mason NASA canceled the liftoff of the space shuttle Columbia yester- day, only 15 seconds prior to liftoff. Delays in the troubled shuttle program are nothing new. It seems that just about every- thing that can go wrong has gone wrong in the last few years. We watch fuel tanks leak, backup computers go bad, life support systems malfunction and suffer through a complete range of incom- prehensible defects in the multi-billion dollar space program. We got to the moon in one piece, but the politics of the Shuttle Program is overwhelming. Remember what Senator John Glenn said during his historic 3 orbit mission in the early days of the Mercury Program. "It worries me some. To think that I'm flying around up here in a machine built by the lowest bidder." At the time, when the space program had the support of the coun- try from the guidance of the young Kennedy and from the fear of the Soviet lead, Glenn's comment was meant to alleviate the tension. Successfully, at that. But since the Apollo fire and the Challenger disaster, and an all too wide array of constant technical problems, political will is waning. The entire space program suffers as a result. Yesterday's aborted launch echoes of further bungling. While the management of NASA is undergoing critical review, and executive replacements seem imminent, the new breed will have to live with past mistakes for some time. Unfortunately, most Americans no longer watch space launches, and those that do tune out once the astronauts are out of camera range. The Space Program suffers from external malaise as well as internal confusion. That is, until yesterday. In an unprecedented move, seconds after the countdown was halted, NASA cut its feeds to the networks and all 4 channels were left with the omnipresent long lens view of the space shuttle sitting idle on its launch pad. In a prepared statement, NASA blamed the aborted flight on yet another leak from the massive and explo- sive 355,000 gallon fuel tanks. In what will clearly become another public relations fiasco, NASA lied to us again. It appears that NASA's computers were invaded. CNN cooped the other three networks by applying advanced digital reconstruction to a few frames of video. Before NASA cut the feed, CNN was receiving pictures of the monitor walls from Mis- sion Control in Houston, Texas. Normally those banks of video monitors contain critical flight information, telemetry, orbital paths and other data to insure the safety of the crew and machin- ery. Yesterday, though, the video monitors carried a message to the nation: CHRISTA MCAULIFFE AND THE CHALLENGER WELCOME THE CREW OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA.