Wanted: A Suborbital Pied Piper

By Sidney Urquhart

Cost overruns and delayed launches are bad enough. Now NASA is facing a different plague: a horde of rats has invaded the agency's gleaming new headquarters in Washington. The brazen little critters have been polishing off uneaten sandwiches and terrifying customers using nasa's automated teller machine. As usual, the agency's exterminators have responded swiftly with yet another acronym: RAS, which stands for Rodent Abatement System.