Word: blastoff
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...needed the triumph. To the dismay of space officials, the maiden launch of Discovery had been postponed three times. The original takeoff date of June 25 was put off when a back-up computer refused to answer a command. The next day a fuel valve faltered 4 sec. before blastoff, again delaying the mission. Then, on Aug. 28, the day before the third scheduled launch, a NASA engineer discovered that the computer charged with the last-minute double-checking of equipment might miss some critical signals. Blast-off was deferred for 24 hrs., as computer programmers scrambled to write...
Discovery's engine No. 3 had already helped power three shuttle missions, and its age was showing. About 6 sec. before blastoff, a heated mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen was supposed to be pumped forcefully through the engine's main fuel line into a central combustion chamber, where it would ignite. But the 10 ¼ in. long, 74-lb. fuel valve faltered a fraction of a second in opening, prompting the central computer system to abort the entire mission. Of the three main engines, only No. 2 had been fully ignited. During its 1.7 sec. ignition...
...lined with firebrick; at Vandenberg, they are made from approximately 130,000 cu. yds. of solid concrete. A special vacuuming process was applied to the concrete while it was setting. This sucked out air and moisture quickly, resulting in a nonporous surface that will better resist cracking during blastoff...
That description could serve the author of these tales as well. After blastoff, the fictional narrator who has combined the "televisualized" Freud, the tin-pan Trotsky and the Shakespearean Star Trek starts to muse. In the future, as in the past, he decides, only one question has real pertinence: What aspects of civilization are worth carrying on? One implicit answer: the ability to wring harmony from dissonance, to create a work of the imagination from disparate and unpromising materials. Example: The End of the World News, a trio made from the detritus of history and scifi...
...upward from its launching pad in Texas last week was not very long (37 ft.) or, by modern standards, very fancy. The flight of Conestoga I, an arc 192 miles up and 326 miles out over the Gulf of Mexico, was perfect but fleeting, less than eleven minutes from blastoff to splashdown. The dummy payload was just a 1,100-lb. tank of water. Said Donald ("Deke") Slayton, the former astronaut who was flight director for the launch: "We didn't have a single anomaly in flight...