Word: aft
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...shuttle began to lift, first a white and then a black puff of smoke gushed from a joint between two of the 149-ft. rocket's four segments. At 59.8 seconds, high in the sky, flame burst through the booster's steel casing, apparently at the same aft joint. In another 13 seconds, the external tank that fueled the orbiter's three main engines exploded in a catastrophic, fatal fireball...
Then the flight grew livelier. Things went wrong by the alphabet. The RCS (reaction control system) locked in the firing position. The GPC (general purpose computer) went down. Fire broke out in the APB (aft payload bay). Mission Commander Larry Cerier of Chicago and Pilot Bill Parker of Friendswood, Texas, worked out the problems coolly. The right stuff. They even got a little cocky. They began to try out banter over the radio in the style of deadpan macho that astronauts affect. When the fire started, Parker took emergency steps (activating switches to spray the area with a chemical fire...
...25th of the conflict. World Knight, a 258,437-ton tanker owned by Hong Kong Shipping Magnate Sir Y.K. Pao, was bound for Kharg Island to pick up Iranian crude oil. Two British officers and four Chinese seamen were killed immediately as the Exocet demolished the ship's aft superstructure. Two more Chinese and one Indian died later. The toll was the worst from a single hit in the seven-month tanker...
...said of her ex-spokeswoman. "She's terrific. Evidently there was a little chemistry that didn't work." Ferraro's main campaign event, a speech to 3,000 members of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, was a cinch to be successful. She is a former teacher and AFT member. "Normally I begin a speech by saying I'm delighted to be here. After this week," she told the cheering, chanting union members, "I have to tell you I am absolutely thrilled...
Like any test pilots, the astronauts gave their flying chair a thorough checkout; McCandless reported that his only real surprise was that the MMU shook and rattled when he turned on the forward-motion jets. The space walkers also retrieved a faulty camera from the aft end of the cargo bay, engaged in a brief and successful tryout of the shuttle's sinewy, 50-ft.-long arm, readjusted a scientific instrument on the big West German-made movable platform called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) and tested some of the tools created for April's satellite retrieval...