Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...take weeks or even months for federal investigators to be certain of the answer, and perhaps they will never know for sure. At least ten separate teams of investigators are now probing every aspect of the mystery of why Challenger exploded; and Acting NASA Administrator William Graham vowed they would "provide the best national capability to study this, to analyze it, to find out how to correct it, and to ensure that it will never happen again...
Then there were all those pictures that the whole nation had seen, over and over again, and that the experts now had to study, in slow motion and with computer enhancements, over and over again. NASA not only had 80 of its own cameras filming the Challenger launch, but it impounded all the film in 90 remote-control cameras that various news organizations (including TIME) had installed near the launch...
Finally, there were the billions of signals sent between the doomed shuttle and NASA computers at Cape Canaveral's Launch Control and in Houston's Mission Control before and during the 73 seconds of its flight. The shuttle contained an extraordinary array of monitoring devices (sensors to detect pressures, temperatures, fuel flow, and so on), which reported their findings thousands of times a second. This flow of information, or telemetry, was so constant and so enormous that a lot of it was not sent either to the shuttle cockpit or to the consoles at Launch and Mission controls. Instead...
...formed on Launch Pad 39-B during Cape Canaveral's 27 degrees F weather the night before the lift-off, had somehow damaged the shuttle. In fact, engineers at Rockwell International, the prime contractor for the shuttle, saw the ice in televised shots of Pad 39-B and telephoned NASA to urge a delay in the launch. But Space Flight Director Moore said that an "ice team" had inspected the shuttle. "We checked just 20 minutes prior to launch, and the consensus of the reports was good," he said. "It was decided that very low risk would be involved...
...week's end the New York Times reported that NASA technicians had found evidence amid the reams of telemetry that seemed to support the burnthrough theory. According to the unnamed source, the data show that the right solid- fuel booster had a pressure drop of nearly 30 lbs. per sq. in. and a loss of 100,000 lbs., or about 4%, of normal thrust about 10 sec. before the explosion --the kind of decrease a burnthrough would have caused. Later the same day, NASA released new pictures and a videotape showing what it called "an unusual plume" of flame streaking...