Word: capes
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...polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely and the vehicle tumbled out of control...
Amid the deepest gloom since three Apollo astronauts died in a gruesome launch-pad fire at the cape in 1967, the U.S. space program has been forced into a long-needed reassessment of its goals and the means to reach them. Not since President John F. Kennedy insisted, just 25 years ago last month, that America should place astronauts on the moon within ten years have national leaders concurred on what the U.S. should be doing in space. "That was the last presidential policy for space," contends former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who now chairs a Reagan-appointed National Commission...
...threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded in a postflight summary that "low temperature enhanced probability" of seal erosion. After testing the resiliency of the rings at various temperatures, the company told NASA on Aug. 9, 1985, that...
...history was completely dismissed on the eve of Challenger's launch. The seals had long been flagged as a problem that could be aggravated by low temperatures. Yet George Hardy, Marshall's deputy director of science and engineering, declared that he was "appalled" by Thiokol's reasoning that the cape's cold weather, predicted to be in the 30s at lift-off, should lead to a delay. In the now notorious teleconference, four Thiokol vice presidents at first concurred with the fears of their engineers. But when they heard the NASA objections, they decided to take a "management" vote...
...again we'd set up a forum or we'd have someone else speaking for an opposing viewpoint, and also we wouldn't ask him to speak on apartheid. We'd ask him to speak on security issues, on issues of Soviet involvement in Southern Africa, and the Cape route and the minerals, and that sort of thing, and in a long term strategic sense more important...