Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ground, things were smooth too. At Cape Canaveral the conditions were perfect for landing, with temperatures in the low 70s and a light breeze blowing, well within NASA's wind limits. The families of some of the seven crew members had already been shown to the runway, assembling for their close-up view of the touchdown. The pit crew that takes custody of the shuttle and shepherds it back into its hangar was standing by to claim Columbia as soon as the crowd cleared. In Mission Control in Houston things were similarly routine. "Many of us came in today marveling...
With reports coming back of a debris field that stretched from eastern Texas to Louisiana, NASA put out the somewhat disingenuous word that fumes from the fragments could be dangerous and that people who found them should leave them where they lay and alert the authorities--as if any toxic fuel could have survived the heat of re-entry. The more probable reason for the space agency's alerts was that tampering with the remains would make a proper investigation of the disaster that much harder. Worse, within hours pieces of debris purported to be from the lost space plane...
...NASA starts trying to pinpoint the cause of all this horror, investigators will have a lot of places to turn. The mission began with at least one anomaly when, at the moment of launch, a piece of foam broke from the insulation on the giant external fuel tank and struck the left wing of the ship. "We spent a goodly amount of time reviewing the film [of the launch] and analyzing what that might do," says shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. "From our experience it was determined that the event did not represent a safety concern...
...entry by thermal blankets and about 24,000 black and white ceramic tiles. The jigsaw-puzzle pieces have given the space agency fits since the very first flight of the very first shuttle--Columbia in April 1981. Handfuls of them often flaked away during lift-off, leaving NASA with nothing to do but wait out the flight and hope that the skin had not been denuded in a critically hot spot. In a worst-case scenario, just a few missing tiles in even a relatively low-temperature area could lead to a fatal chain reaction, with possibly hundreds of them...
...Losing a single tile can do you in," says Stanford University's Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, an engineer and risk-management specialist who once led a NASA study about all the ways shuttle tiles could fail. "Once you have lost the first tile, the adjacent ones become much more vulnerable...