Word: capes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Controllers both at the Cape and in Houston intently monitored Challenger's roaring ascent for a different reason. It is the most critical and most dangerous phase of a space mission. "When you have that much power, you have to respect it," said Flight Director Jay Greene in Houston. "If you get complacent about the launch phase, you don't understand what's going on." In the shuttle, the crew was about to be jammed back into their couches by three times the force of gravity. Their immediate fate was out of their hands...
Heading home from the cape, some of Concord's third-graders stopped for hamburgers in Orlando. One asked, "Well, if there was an accident, when will they come back?" Concord, nestled by New Hampshire's Merrimack River, is one of the nation's smallest state capitals (pop. 30,400). Linked like the rest of the world by the searing television images, the whole city seemed to stiffen in sorrow. Said Pharmacy Clerk Timothy Shurtleff: "People froze in their tracks." A local radio station began playing mourning music. "It's like part of the family has been killed," said Barbara Underwood...
Once on the air, the anchormen's chief problem was how to fill the time. They played prerecorded videotapes of the ill-fated astronauts, interviewed their own correspondents in Cape Canaveral and elsewhere, trotted out scale models of the shuttle to describe how it func tioned and scrambled to round up "experts" who might be able to explain what had happened. ABC got former Astro naut Gene Cernan to its Houston studios. CBS brought on Leo Krupp, a former test pilot for Rockwell International, and NBC recruited former Astronaut Donald ("Deke") Slayton...
...country also responded with extraordinary efforts. The New York Times devoted its entire front page and nine more advertising-free pages to the disaster, virtually unprecedented coverage. More than 80 staff people contributed to the package, including a Times technical manager who witnessed the launch while on vacation in Cape Canaveral. The paper departed from its traditional discursive headline style for a stark opening line: THE SHUTTLE EXPLODES. Said Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal: "I didn't want just another headline. Using 'the' was the most important decision. It gave almost a biblical quality...
...journalists were on hand for the launch, about five times as many as for the previous shuttle flight, and the number grew to nearly 1,200 in the hours following the explosion. But most reporters were hard pressed to uncover ; scraps of news, as NASA officials at both Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space Center in Houston refused all comment. "By midafternoon there was a circling of the wagons," said a NASA employee in Houston. "There was a feeling of overwhelming revulsion toward the media vultures...