Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...were appointed last week to a presidential commission charged with finding out why the space shuttle Challenger had blown up 73 seconds after lift-off from Cape Canaveral, killing its seven-member crew. Without even waiting to assemble a staff, the panel promptly went to work, first grilling top NASA officials in public, then probing more deeply in closed sessions...
Much of the public quizzing focused on the Challenger's two solid-fuel rocket boosters, each 149 ft. tall and 12.2 ft. in diameter. Photographs released by NASA left no doubt that an abnormal plume of flame had appeared on the right-hand booster just before a huge fireball engulfed the entire space vehicle. Although NASA's acting administrator, William Graham, said the flame's location had not been pinpointed, it appeared to be about 36 ft. above the bottom of the rocket's nozzle, near an attachment ring where the lower part of the booster was connected...
...NASA's space-flight director, Jesse Moore, told the panel that the errant flame was first visible at 59.8 seconds into the flight. Graham explained on TV that the flame "appears to grow and grow . . . until it finally goes to the explosion point." Thus the controllers and astronauts had only 13 seconds to discover the problem and react. But NASA officials testified that escape would have been impossible in any case. Arnold Aldrich, shuttle manager at the Johnson Space Center, told the commissioners that Challenger could not have separated from the boosters and the tank until the solid-fuel rockets...
...that morning and had risen to only 38 degrees at the 11:38 a.m. lift-off. Buffeted by overnight winds of up to 35 m.p.h., the shuttle had gone through what meteorologists call a "cold soak," conditions more severe than those at any of the previous 24 shuttle launches. NASA manuals say that the solid fuel in a booster should be ignited only when the rubber-like mixture is between 40 degrees and 90 degrees . Morton Thiokol, the rocket manufacturer, also specifies that the fuel's temperature should never be allowed to fall below freezing. The insulated boosters contain...
...NASA officials conferred by telephone with Thiokol experts on the day before the launch, said Judson Lovingood, deputy shuttle manager at Marshall Space Flight Center. Their concern, however, was not with the fuel, but with the cold affecting the O rings that seal the rocket joints. After these talks, Lovingood told the commission, "Thiokol recommended to proceed" with the flight. Privately, experts explained that gaps in the seals or cracks in the fuel mixture could allow the hot exhaust gases within the booster to reach the rocket's outer steel casing and burn through it. Another possibility was that...