Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...flight decision. "When I heard that, I knew there was more than a mechanical failure," Rogers said. It was then he spoke out publicly, saying "the process may be flawed," words meticulously chosen so that no individual was blamed prematurely, but words that signaled a revolution for NASA...
...hope now: "We have to be in space. We've got to get NASA going again. And we've got to get everybody in the nation behind them...
Then came Challenger. On Jan. 28 the fireball in the blue skies over Florida, after 24 seemingly routine shuttle launches, was seen at first as an inexplicable aberration, akin to an act of God. It was widely assumed that a Government agency with NASA's can-do spirit and engineering wizardry would never permit six crew members and a schoolteacher to perish through some avoidable human error. Surely a mechanical glitch would be found and speedily fixed...
Within days the mechanical problem was located: a joint on one of Challenger's two solid rocket boosters had failed. But the root cause of the tragedy ran deeper. A presidential commission, headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers, discovered NASA itself was deeply flawed. Far from representing the best of American know-how, the twelve-member commission found, NASA had become a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Before the first shuttle was launched, the agency had known of the fatal seal problem but had buried it under a blizzard of paper while permitting schedule-conscious managers...
...failures leave the U.S. temporarily without any means of getting medium to heavy payloads into orbit. "It wasn't very long ago when people were talking about there being too many satellites," says Ivy Hooks, a former NASA engineer. "When you suddenly can't launch them, you realize how critical the weather, spy and communications satellites...