Word: launching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that seemingly fatal plume developed on the booster's side? The panelists kept asking about the unusually cold weather at the launch site. The temperature had dropped to 24 degrees F early that morning and had risen to only 38 degrees at the 11:38 a.m. lift-off. Buffeted by overnight winds of up to 35 m.p.h., the shuttle had gone through what meteorologists call a "cold soak," conditions more severe than those at any of the previous 24 shuttle launches. NASA manuals say that the solid fuel in a booster should be ignited only when the rubber-like mixture...
NASA officials conferred by telephone with Thiokol experts on the day before the launch, said Judson Lovingood, deputy shuttle manager at Marshall Space Flight Center. Their concern, however, was not with the fuel, but with the cold affecting the O rings that seal the rocket joints. After these talks, Lovingood told the 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...
Finally, there were the billions of signals sent between the doomed shuttle and NASA computers at Cape Canaveral's Launch Control and in Houston's Mission Control before and during the 73 seconds of its flight. The shuttle contained an extraordinary array of monitoring devices (sensors to detect pressures, temperatures, fuel flow, and so on), which reported their findings thousands of times a second. This flow of information, or telemetry, was so constant and so enormous that a lot of it was not sent either to the shuttle cockpit or to the consoles at Launch and Mission controls. Instead...
...that ice, which had formed on Launch Pad 39-B during Cape Canaveral's 27 degrees F weather the night before the lift-off, had somehow damaged the shuttle. In fact, engineers at Rockwell International, the prime contractor for the shuttle, saw the ice in televised shots of Pad 39-B and telephoned NASA to urge a delay in the launch. But Space Flight Director Moore said that an "ice team" had inspected the shuttle. "We checked just 20 minutes prior to launch, and the consensus of the reports was good," he said. "It was decided that very low risk...
Like a number of other astronauts, Smith had to wait a while for his turn in the launch rotation. As part of his preparation for last week's flight, Smith had brought along a replica of the Beaufort town flag for his fellow crew members to sign. He planned to present it during commencement exercises next June at his old school, now called Carteret High, where he was to be the featured speaker. Said Senator Jake Garn, who trained with Smith for a 1985 shuttle mission: "He was my mother hen. They assigned him to me." One thing...