Word: boosterism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...instant later the tip of the booster pivoted into the external fuel tank. The ensuing explosion rocked but did not obliterate the shuttle. "The orbiter itself seemed to float, very briefly, above the fireball of exploding hydrogen and oxygen," said one member of the shuttle inquiry panel. He was reminded of the way a bubble survives a cascade over Niagara Falls, "so fragile, yet with all that wild energy around it." Says a National Transportation Safety Board investigator: "The crew compartment was pressurized and sealed tight and welded into a kind of cocoon or bubble that may have suffered relatively...
NASA officials acknowledged last week that the impact of the crash on the U.S. space effort has been to ground the shuttle program for at least a year, and perhaps as long as 18 months. A study by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that redesigning the flawed rocket booster and replacing the shuttle's cargo, a tracking satellite, will cost some $440 million. If a new orbiter is built to replace Challenger, it would cost at least $2.3 billion and take three or four years to complete. When NASA does resume shuttle operations, its overambitious aim of launching 24 flights...
...Base in the California desert "may be a wonderful political policy," Young wrote his NASA bosses in January, "it is not an intelligent technical policy." Shuttle Inquiry Commission Member Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate, charged last week that the shuttle blew up because of "hopeless" design flaws in the booster. He blamed "attitudinal problems" in NASA's management...
Some NASA officials have scrambled to pass off blame for the Challenger disaster. The brass at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., have been trying to point the finger at Kennedy Space Center for botching the assembly of the solid rocket booster. Marshall's bureaucrats are accused of ignoring the warnings of engineers at Morton Thiokol, maker of the solid rocket booster, to postpone the launch because the cold weather could have damaged the O rings that sealed the segments of the booster. The evasions and backbiting have shocked members of the presidential panel. "A whole new NASA...
...male bosses who employ them. "I never look at gender or hair color or clothing," avers Steven Spielberg, who chose women to direct three of the 24 episodes for his Amazing Stories. "I look at talent." But every baby mogul knows he must be a businessman first, a booster second. Says Mark Canton, president of production at Warner Bros.: "Nobody hires a woman just because she's a woman. The stakes are too high to be an idealist...