Word: boosters
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...clanking, metallic roar. Because of turbulence caused by sudden wind shifts, Challenger's crew had an especially rocky launch right from lift-off. Just 72 seconds into the flight--a second and a half before the explosion--the orbiter yawed suddenly to the right. As the righthand rocket booster broke loose, spewing superhot gases from a faulty joint, the shuttle's engines tried to compensate for the loss of pressure, and the crew must have felt swift side-to-side lurches...
...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...
...Winning that race was the big confidence booster for us,” Stephens said. “After beating them and beating them by that much, we started to realize that we were fast...
...passionate supporter of the Chinese Communist Party and comrade to many of its leaders; in Beijing. The son of socialist Jewish emigres who settled in Tianjin, Epstein was drawn to the Communist cause after a meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong in 1944. Often the country's only English-language booster during its years of isolation, he edited the magazine China Today and wrote books like 1947's The Unfinished Revolution in China, becoming a Chinese citizen and remaining a loyal Party member even after his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. On the eve of his 90th birthday in April, Premier...