February 27, 2006 -- Juan Olivas told KFOX he was glued to the TV Tuesday afternoon, watching the NASA channel.

Earlier, his son, Danny, gave him the news that the Shuttle Atlantis would not be blasting off as scheduled.

"Nature is something that you can't control so when this happens, you just accept it," Olivas said. "And he wasn't nervous at all, he just feels disappointed a little bit and said, 'Well we'll just have to see what needs to be done so we can continue forward.'"

Danny Olivas, El Paso's first astronaut, was in Florida undergoing his flight readiness review when word of the shuttle delay came down. He and the other five crew members were there when the storm hit the launch pad with damage severe enough to delay the March 15 mission.

In an exclusive interview at Johnson Space Center this month, Olivas told KFOX astronauts have to be ready for anything in this job, even delays.

"As we've seen in recent pasts, space flight is a hard thing to do and it's hard to anticipate what could go wrong and so it's the prospects of what else could be out there that we're going to have to work with," Olivas said.

For Juan Olivas and his wife, the delay means a longer wait until their son's launch day, which is nerve-wracking but worth it.

"I'd rather stay with the safety factor and sit back and wait some more. I got no problems with that," Olivas said.