Word: caping
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Throughout the week, as mourning continued, Coast Guard and NASA officials undertook the grim task of searching for the wreckage of Challenger. Starting some 30 miles off the cape and then spreading out to cover some 6,000 sq. mi., 13 aircraft and more than a dozen recovery vessels joined the search of the conveniently calm Atlantic waters for any evidence that might give clues as to why the spacecraft had exploded...
...Sunday morning, McAuliffe, who had earlier reassured her parents by telephone that she was "rarin' to go," was set once again. Her parents, along with 18 third-graders from Concord, had flown to the cape to watch the lift-off. Christa's son Scott, 9, was in the class. Her daughter Caroline, 6, was also there but had never quite understood what her mother was doing. While McAuliffe had been in training, Caroline had asked several times by phone, "Mom, are you in space...
...nine minutes and counting," intoned NASA Commentator Hugh Harris over the cape's public address system. His words were also broadcast widely by radio...
Waiting out this frustrating postponement at the cape, Ed Corrigan, Christa's father, said wryly, "I would have gotten the hacksaw sooner." Commented his wife Grace: "I would have gotten my nail file." One veteran consultant to NASA was less charitable, asking, "Can you imagine a pad leader permitting an s.o.b. to show up for work with a drill with a dead battery...
...towering gantry. They decided that there was no danger of any icicles breaking away on lift-off and harming the heat-shield tiles. Just 20 minutes before the scheduled lift-off, they made another check. A Rockwell engineer in California, watching by closed-circuit TV, telephoned the cape to urge a delay because of the ice. But Kennedy Space Center Director Richard Smith, having been advised that there was little risk, permitted the countdown to continue...