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Show GRAND JUNCTION SENTINEL Grand Junction, Colo. 20 May64 A helicopter sweeps over spectators Problem waiting for an Athena missile firing at Green River, Utah. At 5:25, the hundred Ground Big Bird By JACK KISLING Sentinel Staff Writer GREEN RIVER - Undaunted by a 3%-hour countdown that ended in cancellation of an Athena rocket shot Tuesday, missile men put the big bird away late in the afternoon and Invited everybody back for May 28. . ! The launching, to have been the second of a 77-shot series planned from the Green River base, was scheduled for 2 p.m. Tuesday. The Athena, a 50-foot-long scaled down ICBM, was to • streak 470 miles to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in nine minutes flat. But the 2 p.m. firing time was moved back to 2:30. Then 3 p.m. then 4, then 4:10. The deadline for firing was 5:30 p.m. or so spectators who lined a low bluff a mile away from the launch pad heard a loudspeaker tell them what they had begun to su s p e c.t. The shot was off. Scrubbed, as the missile people say. It was the second postponement since an UWated Feb. 10 shot that lobbed an Athena off course into southwest Colorado and delayed the firing program while a more elaborate system controls was put into effect. The crowd, with 3% hours to wait and nothing else to do, occupied itself with scuttlebutt. The commentary included: An ARC man, answering a photographer's plea to get him closer to the launch site, said, ball, but it's the Arjny/_s_stajddum. and they say M.". An Air Force man, asked which end of the line would get the blame for the failure, said, "We don't want to say that it was the Army's fault or the Air Force's fault. All we want to Tuesday's trouble was not the know is what went w Athena missile itself, according , TT, . , . to Lt. Col. James Titsworth, Afr| ,A ^ newsmf. being mter- , I viewed by another Utah newsman, said, "People in Carbon launch <;itp Thp nrnhlpm was > ' F vaiuuu ™^f ;J:1£° 6m W ! and Emery and Grand counties are worried about all the bad publicity these failures are range instrumentation. * * Officials of Atlantic Research Corp., the civilian outfit that puts the missile together at bringing. They're afraid some-body'll come along and close down Green River." "Maybe not," the other re- Green River and readies it forjpiied. "When they started this firing, also indicated the trouble | thing, they told us that the long-was not with the missile but I er it took to do the job, the long-with the vast radar system that! er we could expect to have an tells where the missile has been "installation! From that stand-and where it is going. - point, things don't look so bad." "i- - |