Word: launching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...called grass-roots support. Direct-mail outfits, armed with computer banks that are stocked with targeting groups, can create "instant constituencies" for special-interest bills. To repeal a 1982 provision requiring tax withholding on dividends and interest, the small banks and thrifts hired a mass-mailing firm to launch a letter-writing campaign that flooded congressional offices with some 22 million pieces of mail. The bankers' scare tactics were dubious--they managed to convince their depositors that the withholding provision was a tax hike, when in fact it was set up merely to make people pay taxes that they legally...
...last week the atmosphere, and NASA's image, had changed. After declaring that NASA's procedure for deciding whether to launch Challenger "may have been flawed," Rogers demanded that no NASA official involved in that decision take further part in the space agency's own investigation. And word leaked out that Rogers had told the White House he had been "appalled" by the way the launch decision had been made. At a public hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings said of the disaster: "At this particular juncture it seems like...
...commission had grilled top NASA officials as well as engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that makes the solid-fuel boosters suspected of triggering the disaster. The commissioners could scarcely believe what they were hearing as they made some startling discoveries: 1) the engineers had adamantly opposed the launch because of the unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral; 2) on the morning of the tragedy, an infrared temperature-sensing instrument had shown abnormal "cold spots" of 7 degrees and 9 degrees F on the lower part of the right-hand booster; and 3) most unsettling of all, neither...
There was a stunned silence in the commission's closed hearing room at the cape after Robert Sieck, shuttle manager at the Kennedy Space Center, Gene Thomas, the launch director for Challenger at Kennedy, and Arnold Aldrich, manager of space transportation systems at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, all testified that they had never before heard that Thiokol engineers had objected to the launch. Rogers ordered everyone except the commissioners out of the room and declared, "We must advise the President as soon as possible." Explained one commission source: "We did not want the President to be blindsided...
Earlier in the week, engineers from Morton Thiokol, which manufactures the shuttle's booster rockets, said they argued against the launch because they feared booster safety seals would not work properly after a night in subfreezing weather...