Word: caping
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Thousands of motorists in the cape area, listening to their radios, pulled off highways and faced the ocean. On Challenger's middeck, Onizuka, Jarvis and McAuliffe had nothing to do except wait. At dozens of points around the globe, radar tracking stations had now synchronized their antenna systems with the countdown sequence in Florida...
Like runners passing a baton, Harris handed off the public narration to Steve Nesbitt, the communicator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. At the cape, his voice was lost amid the cheers of some 1,000 spectators watching on bleachers some four miles from Pad 39-B. Even at that distance, they could feel the power of the blast-off, which elicits an almost instinctive elation. A graceful sculpture arising from an awesome explosion: it was just as it was supposed to look. Among the relieved viewers were relatives of most of Challenger's crew, including Christa's parents...
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...