<font color="yellow">For the TDRSS, three. Two in White Sands, one in Guam. If you also airburst Kennedy, that should put NASA in such a panic that they wont be able to reestablish communications using other methods. <br /><br />With communications out there's no way for them to warn the astronauts of the terrible threat onboard. Thousands of venomous snakes... on a spaceplane.</font><br /><br />If bad guys managed to somehow take out those TDRSS ground stations, no doubt there are other ground-based facilities still available that they could use to communicate during shuttle fly-overs -- just like in the old days.<br /><br />Although Houston takes over the management of the missions after takeoff, I do believe NASA can communicate with the shuttle from either KSC or Houston. (I'm remembering that Houston was going to send a skeleton crew to KSC to communicate with the shuttle if Hurricane Ernesto hit Mission Control.)<br /><br />If both Houston and KSC got taken out by a tsunami or evil space cooties or whatnot, one assumes the military has an an assortment of communications facilities that could be brought to bear.<br /><br />If the cooties infested the entire country including the military space communications infrastructure, NASA could probably borrow the use of some Russian communications equipment in a pinch. Given all the cooperative work on ISS, it'd likely be no problem for the Russians to contact the shuttle, too, if nobody in the United States was able to do it.<br /><br />Of course, if the space cooties took out everything, that would mean simply that Armegeddon was upon us -- and reestablishing contact with the shuttle would be somewhere down on the list of problems that needed addressing.<br /><br />But human ingenuity being what it is, there are probably backup options that even the experts haven't thought of yet. Of course, it would be hugely preferable if things never came to that. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#0000ff"><strong>Just tell the truth and let the chips fall...</strong></font> </div>