Word: boosterous
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Whether the space accidents were merely coincidental or shared some human failing was not clear. A poorly designed joint in the shuttle's boosters, coupled with the refusal of officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the rockets were developed, to heed engineers' warnings about the cold weather at launch time, presumably will be cited by a presidential commission as contributing to that catastrophe. The commission disclosed last week that just five days before the disaster, the Marshall managers had virtually dismissed the recurring flaws in the joint, deciding in an unsigned internal memo that "this...
...underwater search operation in history. Costing some $20 million, the search also retrieved enough of the shuttle's parts to substantiate the findings of NASA investigators and a presidential commission looking into the disaster. The probers have concluded that a joint between two segments of the shuttle's right booster failed, letting superhot gases escape and rapidly ignite liquid fuel from the external tank, causing an explosion 73 seconds into the flight...
While actual cram courses are indeed ineffectual at best, there is irrefutable evidence that the Kaplan program is much more than an "expensive confidence booster." No less an authority than the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a 1979 study on standardized-test prep courses, wrote, "though it cannot be concluded that coaching [in general] will work for everyone, the results of the study do show that coaching can be effective for those who do not score well on standardized tests." Much more significantly, they added, "coaching at School A [Kaplan] can be effective for all students, not just...
Geraghty disagreed that the course affects LSAT scores. "There's no evidence whatsoever that a cram course does any good," said Geraghty. "It's simply a very expensive confidence booster...
...engineers about the cold weather. Last week NASA's new shuttle chief, Rear Admiral Richard Truly, took a refreshingly different stance. The agency had been wrong, Truly candidly conceded, on that fateful day. Before another mission blasts off, he vowed, NASA would reshape not just the shuttle's faulty booster rockets but also the process for deciding when to launch. Declared the admiral: "To defend the indefensible and pretend we didn't lose the Challenger and crew would be ludicrous...