OGDEN — Liftoff was touch and go for the cockpit crew of the orbiter Phoenix. For one thing, the astronauts got only little more than an hour of mission training, as opposed to the 18 months usually required by NASA.
Then there was the fact that the ground staffs of both Mission Control and the Operations Center, also new to their jobs, could not pronounce some of the complex names of the technical systems they were trying to power up and lock down. And to top it off, there was the distracting group of kindergartners standing around a piano in the hallway, singing about colors and raindrops.
