Word: launching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Referring to the avalanche of documents concerning shuttle safety that the space agency passes from desk to desk, Rogers scolded some top NASA launch officials, "You eliminate the element of good judgment and common sense." Frustrated by conflicting accounts of positions taken at crucial preflight meetings, Rogers asked with cutting incredulity, "Does everybody know what everybody else is recommending?" He wondered aloud why those involved had not been required to take clear stands on life-and-death safety issues and had not had their positions recorded. And, Rogers concluded, he was certain the members of the presidential commission agreed with...
...shuttle's prime contractors: Morton Thiokol, which makes the solid-fuel boosters that are the main focus of the search for a cause of the disaster, and Rockwell International, which manufactures the orbiter. Officials and engineers of both companies insisted that they had opposed the launch, at least initially, because of the cold weather and ice at the pad. But the NASA officials who heard the complaints contended that the objections had never been raised as forcefully as the contractors now claim and that in the end the disagreements had been resolved. Thus the NASA experts felt no need...
...that might put the best light on his performance and ease his conscience. George Hardy, a high engineering official at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the boosters were developed, last week accused Allan McDonald, the top Thiokol engineer present at Cape Canaveral for the launch, of having drawn on a "convenience of memory" in testifying about his preflight safety objections. Rogers protested that the comment implied McDonald might be lying and asked Hardy to withdraw...
...July 1985 NASA Budget Analyst Richard Cook had warned in an internal memo that unless the O rings were improved, a "catastrophic" failure might follow. Three weeks ago, he revealed that during every shuttle launch, some engineers had "held their breath" in fear of an O-ring failure. Last week Engineer Roger Boisjoly, Thiokol's top expert on the rings, testified that he had sent a similar memo to his superiors only days after Cook sent his. On any one flight, his memo warned, it was "a jump ball" as to whether the seal would hold...
...correlation between temperature and the amount of erosion experienced in the O rings on previous flights. Boisjoly worried in particular about Shuttle Mission 51-C in January 1985, in which the seal temperature had been 53 degrees (although the air had warmed to 66 degrees by the time of launch). When the spent boosters were recovered from that flight, what Boisjoly described as black soot "just like coal" was found behind a primary ring in one booster, indicating that gases had blown past the first ring. Although erosion had also been found after flights in warmer temperatures...