Word: jointly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Within days the mechanical problem was located: a joint on one of Challenger's two solid rocket boosters had failed. But the root cause of the tragedy ran deeper. A presidential commission, headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers, discovered NASA itself was deeply flawed. Far from representing the best of American know-how, the twelve-member commission found, NASA had become a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Before the first shuttle was launched, the agency had known of the fatal seal problem but had buried it under a blizzard of paper while permitting schedule-conscious managers...
Under any circumstances, Fletcher will be hard-pressed to meet his deadline for relaunching the shuttle. The problems demanding urgent solutions involve far more than redesigning the rocket joint that failed. NASA has identified about 50 potentially dangerous faults that will require remedies before a flight can be scheduled. They range from long-standing braking problems that have made many landings risky ventures to a basic question about the reliability of the orbiter's three main engines. Rogers Commission Member Eugene Covert, a professor of aeronautics at M.I.T., headed a joint government-industry team in the late 1970s that solved...
...exposed the problems. The Rogers report is expected to detail the extraordinary tale of the now famous O rings, the synthetic-rubber circles, .28 in. thick and 37.5 ft. in circumference, designed to make certain that the superhot gases generated within each solid booster could not escape through the joints of the rocket's segments. When flames did penetrate a rocket joint on Challenger, they ignited the shuttle's external liquid-fuel tank, causing the explosion. The commission will cite the O-ring history not only as the cause of the catastrophe but also as an exemplar of the agency...
NASA was even warned by outside experts that its booster joints were a serious problem. On March 9, 1984, George Morefield, then chief engineer for United Space Boosters, wrote to Lawrence Mulloy, then the booster manager at Marshall, to explain that the Titan rockets produced by his company for the Air Force had a similar joint problem. Although a thousand of the Titan joints had flown without a failure, Morefield told Mulloy, on a shuttle flight "the potential for failure of the joint is higher...
Putnam also said a Berkeley Professor, Nelson W. Polsby, will make a decision on a joint tenure offer by the Government Department and the Kennedy School of Government after a one-year stint at Harvard next year...