Word: flighting
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...ruptured but not completely destroyed. The lower mid-deck, where Astronauts Ronald McNair and Gregory Jarvis and New Hampshire Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe had been seated, apparently absorbed the full force of the blast from the shuttle's huge external fuel tank and was nearly obliterated. The upper flight deck, where the commander, Francis Scobee, as well as Astronauts Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka and Judith Resnik were seated, was still partly intact. The Navy's team of 40-odd divers managed to bring to the surface the remains of the crew members. The divers also recovered the shuttle's four flight...
...shuttle takeoff is never a smooth ascent; heavy buffeting and shaking rattle the craft, and the crew is deafened by a clanking, metallic roar. Because of turbulence caused by sudden wind shifts, Challenger's crew had an especially rocky launch right from lift-off. Just 72 seconds into the flight--a second and a half before the explosion--the orbiter yawed suddenly to the right. As the righthand rocket booster broke loose, spewing superhot gases from a faulty joint, the shuttle's engines tried to compensate for the loss of pressure, and the crew must have felt swift side...
...Cape Canaveral said, "it is likely that the crew was knocked unconscious immediately and felt nothing during the [three-to-four-minute] fall to the ocean. I want to guess that they were unconscious all the way down, if any of them really survived the fireball and breakup in flight." Some experts believed that the tremendous force of hitting the ocean after a 55,000-ft. fall did as much damage to the crew compartment as the explosion...
Some NASA officials have scrambled to pass off blame for the Challenger disaster. The brass at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., have been trying to point the finger at Kennedy Space Center for botching the assembly of the solid rocket booster. Marshall's bureaucrats are accused of ignoring the warnings of engineers at Morton Thiokol, maker of the solid rocket booster, to postpone the launch because the cold weather could have damaged the O rings that sealed the segments of the booster. The evasions and backbiting have shocked members of the presidential panel. "A whole new NASA...
...chairman and controlling stockholder has got nothing but trouble. As a strike by 6,000 flight attendants grounded nearly half of TWA's flights last week, the carrier's losses rose higher and higher. TWA had a $123 million deficit in the final quarter of 1985 and is expected to drop almost $200 million more in the first three months of this year. Concludes Robert Joedicke, an airline industry expert for the Shearson/Lehman Bros. investment firm: "Icahn has bitten off more than he can chew." The chairman, though, is maintaining a brave front. Says he: "I was looking...