Word: pads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 pad...
...that ice, which had 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...
John Hagen, the gentle astronomer who was heading the American space probe, Project Vanguard, puffed his pipe in his dingy corner of the Naval Research Laboratory and foresaw the coming competition. But his soul was geared to an earlier age, and his rocket remained rooted to its Cape Canaveral pad. Hagen's men were perfectionists; they were searching for data, not power. And that's where they erred. By then, politics was taking over. The Vanguard was hurried, and when its engine was finally ignited in December 1957, the slender missile lurched and exploded. John Hagen's kindly eyes wept...
...boppity bop-bop-bop-bop. Snugged up in his private plane, plugged into his Walkman, Pete St. John, media consultant to politicians, drums his cares away on the practice pad that accompanies him everywhere. Pete's life moves to this same rhythm: jazzy, snazzy, yet lacking in soul. If he had one it would be packed in a two-suiter with his scruples, in the lost-luggage office of some airport on a half-forgotten campaign trail...
While no one at NASA will even speculate on when shuttle flights might resume, other knowledgeable officials cite the sole precedent: after a fire destroyed an Apollo spacecraft on the launching pad and killed three astronauts in January 1967, it took 21 months before manned space flights resumed. "We've got to reckon in about those terms," says New Jersey Republican Jim Courter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who follows the space program closely. The moratorium could be shortened if the flaw turns out to be something that can be fixed fairly quickly. But it could stretch...