Word: liftoff
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...NASA's Space Transportation System (STS-8) could read newspapers outdoors at 2:32 a.m. Awed by the sight of the flames against the night sky, Flight Commander Richard Truly, a veteran of the shuttle's second flight, asked ground controllers to record his impressions moments after liftoff. Said he: "The light from the solid rocket motors was about 500 times more than I remember...
Certainly Mission Control had no problems with the five-member crew, the largest yet to fly on a shuttle. Barely a day after their flaming on-time liftoff, Crippen and company set out two commercial communications satellites, one Canadian, the other Indonesian. By week's end the satellites had completed their long six-day climbs to "geostationary" orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. "That's four for four," Ride announced proudly, tallying up the number of commercial satellites successfully launched by the shuttle...
...force. SORRY, NO VACANCY signs hung as far as 50 miles away. Some 1,600 correspondents packed the press grandstand. On the beaches around Cape Canaveral, half a million people watched. Not since the first flight of Columbia two years ago had so many enthusiasts assembled for a shuttle liftoff...
...boss of the shuttle program, said that discovery of the defect was a tribute to the space agency's quest for safety. He might have added that it was also because of an odd bit of luck. In late January, only days before Challenger's originally scheduled liftoff, NASA inspectors discovered that hydrogen was leaking from the No. 1 engine...
Because this launch site is farther north than Cape Canaveral, spacecraft get less of a boost from the earth's rotation (whose velocity is highest at the equator) and thus need more power on liftoff...