The consequences could be disastrous if lightning hit the Shuttle. The driver'd never know what hit. He traces the truck's route on a map of the Kennedy Space Center, shakes his head.
Lightning is the costliest weather problem they have.
The pad and the shuttle stand up so high they're natural lightning rods. And Florida gets the most lightning per square kilometer of any place in the entire United States. There are in excess of 100 thunderstorm days per year in the state of Florida. In 1993 Penn State meteorology professor Greg Forbes took a research fellowship at Kennedy Space Center. Although weather observations were improving, the effort to increase the lightning lead time, Forbes saw, was being strangely hampered by those same improvements.