Word: boosterism
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...sudden turnabout? In closed meetings the commission had grilled top NASA officials as well as engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that makes the solid-fuel boosters suspected of triggering the disaster. The commissioners could scarcely believe what they were hearing as they made some startling discoveries: 1) the engineers had adamantly opposed the launch because of the unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral; 2) on the morning of the tragedy, an infrared temperature-sensing instrument had shown abnormal "cold spots" of 7 degrees and 9 degrees F on the lower part of the right-hand booster; and 3) most...
...latest developments focused once again on the unusually frigid Florida temperatures, which had fallen to the mid-20s, accompanied by 35-m.p.h. gusts for hours before Challenger was launched, and on the right booster, which had clearly failed. Less than half a second after booster ignition, just as the 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...
...Feynman probed further, he was told by NASA that the surface temperature of the external tank, which contains supercold liquid oxygen (-297 degrees ) and hydrogen (-423 degrees ) had not been abnormally cold, casting doubt on a theory that liquid fuel, leaking unnoticed from the tank, had chilled the nearby booster. He also discovered that the wind on the morning of the launch had been blowing across the cold surface of the tank toward the right booster. As one NASA engineer explained, "Even a slight breeze, wafting over the external tank full of those cryogens (supercold fluids) may have been enough...
Incredible as it may seem, Shuttle Director Moore also had been one of the officials who were never told of the heated opposition to the launch by Thiokol engineers or the discovery of the booster's cold spots. Asked by the Senate subcommittee what he would have done if he had known about the cold spots, Moore replied, "I would have asked more questions about what the readings indicated." Said Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore Jr.: "The record calls into question the way alarm bells are rung and heard" at NASA...
While investigators probed the possibility of human error, the search for evidence of the technical failure that caused the Challenger explosion continued off Cape Canaveral. A flotilla of four undersea craft and ten surface ships had located and photographed parts of the right booster, scattered on the ocean floor under about 1,200 ft. of water...