Word: airtight
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...sorting out and studying countless blobs of melted wiring, poring over the soot-coated, grey-scorched dials, tubes and toggle switches of the instrument panel. The outer surface of the capsule was blistered and blackened in places, evidence that the blaze somehow erupted through the light skin of the airtight craft. The board ordered another, partially completed Apollo spacecraft flown to Cape Kennedy from North American Aviation's plant in Downey, Calif., so that investigators could compare its components with the blackened debris scattered about the ruined craft...
...using an exterior source. The trio climbed inside the ship, hooked up their silver suits to the environmental control system (which feeds oxygen to the suits and purifies the air in the cabin), snapped their faceplates shut and waited while the suits became pressurized. At 2:50 p.m., the airtight double hatch plates were sealed. And the familiar routine began, an infinitely detailed run-through that was scheduled to last slightly more than five hours...
...LBNP looks like an oil drum and can be fastened tightly at the waist. Made of rubberized, aluminum-lined canvas, it creates an airtight bag for the body's bottom half. Air is pumped out to create a partial vacuum. Since cabin air pressure is therefore greater on the body's upper half, some blood is forced into the lower part-approximating the effect of gravity-and the heart must make an earthlike extra effort to keep blood moving down below...
Although = Though. A persuasive case could probably be argued against the need for any guidebooks to good usage, but an airtight case could surely be marshaled against windy ones. William Strunk Jr.'s succinct Elements of Style (71 pages; TIME, July 13, 1959) does not waste time, for example, on the nonexistent difference between although and though; Modern American Usage squanders 750 words on the subject, concludes: "There is not much to be lost by treating the two words as interchangeable and not much to be gained by attempts to differentiate them...
...that, the Warren Commission was neither perfect in its procedure nor airtight in its presentation of evidence. There is some justice to the critics' contentions that staff lawyers felt rushed, that there were intense deadline pressures and that every loose-end lead was not neatly tied up. The commission might have prevented some of the current criticism if it had appointed a kind of devil's advocate to challenge evidence aggressively on behalf of the assassin. Many of the complaints against it, of course, concern the inevitable flaws that accompany any juridical proceeding: contradictions, loopholes, gaps of fact...