Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Across the nation, there was vast public sympathy for NASA's sorrowful officials as they began seeking the accident's cause. "We grieve at NASA," said Jesse Moore, its associate administrator for space flight. "We grieve every day." A presidential commission headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers opened its investigation with a protective attitude toward NASA. Rogers even publicly badgered an internal critic of NASA's safety standards about his competence to criticize. Surely it would eventually be found that, despite NASA's elaborate precautions, some technical aberration had caused the tragedy...
...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...
Even the authoritative and generally pro-NASA trade journal Aviation Week & Space Technology was critical. While praising the "dedication, high level of effort and in many cases personal sacrifice" of NASA personnel, it charged that "undercurrents reveal a hidebound space agency fraught with lax management oversight, intramural turf battles between headquarters and key field centers and a tendency toward compartmentalized bureaucratic thinking that, in the aftermath of the accident, has generated self-serving responses...
...sudden turnabout? In closed meetings the 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...
Summarizing three days of hearings at which several witnesses complained that their concerns were not passed to the agency's top officials, Chairman William Rogers told four senior NASA officials, "You eliminate the element of good judgment and common sense...