Word: launchful
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ANATOMY OF A FLAW NASA spent more than two years and $1 billion to make sure that the accident that doomed Columbia in 2003 couldn't happen again. Despite assurances that it was safe to launch Discovery, several pieces of foam broke free during takeoff last week, forcing an embarrassed NASA to put all future flights on hold...
WHAT WENT WRONG . . . The largest piece of foam missed Discovery entirely. Another piece may have struck the wing but did no obvious damage. Protective tiles on the orbiter's underside, including one near its vulnerable nosewheel well, seem to have been gouged during launch, perhaps by more falling foam...
...never been particularly motivated by money," Gore told TIME last week, "but, you know, I like to make a good living, and I truly believe you can do well and do good at the same time." This week's launch of Current TV, his new 24-hour youth cable network, will test that proposition. The cable channel claims it will do nothing less than democratize television, giving anyone with a digital camera and a computer the kind of power that used to be enjoyed only by the mainstream media. Current TV will invite a young army of "citizen journalists...
...massive federal bureaucracy and wire every classroom to the Internet. In his unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign, Gore once even considered bypassing his high-priced consultants and enlisting ordinary voters to make his campaign commercials--an approach that looks very much like the cable network he is about to launch. "He's a visionary," says Joel Hyatt, the attorney-entrepreneur who is his partner in the cable venture. "He's doing things that are new, daring, difficult, just as he tried to do as a public servant...
...NASA starts trying to pinpoint the cause of all this horror, investigators will have a lot of places to turn. The mission began with at least one anomaly when, at the moment of launch, a piece of foam broke from the insulation on the giant external fuel tank and struck the left wing of the ship. "We spent a goodly amount of time reviewing the film [of the launch] and analyzing what that might do," says shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. "From our experience it was determined that the event did not represent a safety concern...