Word: flame
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...exceptionally rich voices and loads of stage presence. Korn plays a soulful and winsome part, and Meredith vamps relentlessly, steaming up the stage as a veiled-and-sequined cross between Madonna and Bette Midler. Warren, too, as the lovelorn Celia, belts out a show-stopping number to her old flame, Ahab, begging him not to make her retire ("Don't Veil...
Much of the public quizzing focused on the Challenger's two solid-fuel rocket boosters, each 149 ft. tall and 12.2 ft. in diameter. Photographs released by NASA left no doubt that an abnormal plume of flame had appeared on the right-hand booster just before a huge fireball engulfed the entire space vehicle. Although NASA's acting administrator, William Graham, said the flame's location had not been pinpointed, it appeared to be about 36 ft. above the bottom of the rocket's nozzle, near an attachment ring where the lower part of the booster was connected...
NASA's space-flight director, Jesse Moore, told the panel that the errant flame was first visible at 59.8 seconds into the flight. Graham explained on TV that the flame "appears to grow and grow . . . until it finally goes to the explosion point." Thus the controllers and astronauts had only 13 seconds to discover the problem and react. But NASA officials testified that escape would have been impossible in any case. Arnold Aldrich, shuttle manager at the Johnson Space Center, told the commissioners that Challenger could not have separated from the boosters and the tank until the solid-fuel rockets...
...commission, "Thiokol recommended to proceed" with the flight. Privately, experts explained that gaps in the seals or cracks in the fuel mixture could allow the hot exhaust gases within the booster to reach the rocket's outer steel casing and burn through it. Another possibility was that the flame-retarding material between the booster sections could have loosened under the wide variations in temperature, providing another route for a burnthrough. Most analysts assume that once the flame sliced through the rocket casing, it reached the liquid-fuel tank, burning through either the tank's wall or the connecting fuel lines...
...loss of 100,000 lbs., or about 4%, of normal thrust about 10 sec. before the explosion --the kind of decrease a burnthrough would have caused. Later the same day, NASA released new pictures and a videotape showing what it called "an unusual plume" of flame streaking from an apparently enlarging gap in the side of the right booster immediately before the explosion. That seemed to be strong evidence...