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aborted launch attempt on July 12, and had planned to do the same on the actual launch day. Unfortunately, some final delays pushed the launch into the late afternoon/early evening drive times, and the local San Antonio all-news affiliates (both KRNN and WOAI) failed to join for coverage, so at the last minute (literally) I switched to the CNN coverage on TV. I had developed somewhat of a routine of calling into Dial-a-Shuttle to check to see if the remainder of the boost phase to MECO was going well, I did so on this day as well and........let's just say I got an earful. Once I could see that we had some kind of off-nominaI situation I immediately put the phone receiver over the embedded mic on the recorder, but unbeknownst to me I got nothing because of what, unbeknownst to me, was the beginning of some kind of short in the direct feed mic system of my well-used 3 year old cassette recorder. Hence, I got none of the drama, or the rather non-nominal air-to-ground calls (such as "limits to inhibit" and the like) associated with the ATO call. In terms of coverage of the ATO episode, the already late launch, coming as it was late in the afternoon, caught many news outlets with their pants down, seemingly, and this included CNN as well. CNN simply continued with early evening news and financial reporting all during the episode and for several minutes following MECO, not bothering to break to the drama. The only other network that I'm aware of that broke in to cover the thing was NBC News with Tom Brokaw, holding some kind of unwieldy looking earphone, listening in to and then explaining what had transpired (yes, I did my share of frantic and also curious "channel surfing" during that time). The coverage and recording issues alone were enough to prematurely age me, not to mention the RSLS Abort and ATO event (in fact, when I tuned into Dial-a-Shuttle during the ATO my initial impression of the DiaI-a-Shuttle commentator's comments was that we were in a much more serious situation, namely a Transatlantic Abort). Nevertheless, with those issues over with and the Challenger and Spacelab 2 in orbit, the rest of the recording was fairly "routine" for me, once again primarily involving the CBS World News Roundup each morning. With both launch attempts coming relatively late in the afternoon, I had actually taken off from work early to follow the activities. With the 10-week summer session winding down at UTSA, I was needing to take some time off anyway shortly after this flight was set to land. I could ill afford at this point to take off to follow a Shuttle flight, so I took my chances that WOAI would join CBS Radio for the landing (KLBJ in Austin, and that AP Network affiliate couldn't be picked up inside the lab of the metal frame building). Well, WOAI was up to its old capricious tricks of not joining the network, and I got none of the live coverage of the landing. At this point, I was simply glad that this flight was over with without any further incidents.