Beggs admitted privately that the agency could effectively manage only “around a dozen” shuttle flights per year. There were fourteen more, including the Teacher in Space flight, lined up for the rest of 1986, with nineteen on the docket for 1987. Such a schedule kept the pressure mounting on everyone from Beggs down to shuttle-maintenance crews at Cape Canaveral. To keep up, some KSC technicians worked up to eighty hours a week for seven or eight weeks in a row.
