Word: payloads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rare failure. Less than a minute after lift-off from Pad 36B at Cape Canaveral in threatening weather, a $78 million, 137-ft. rocket disappeared into rain- swollen thunderheads and went out of control. A range safety officer hit the destruct button, and the rocket exploded along with its payload, an $83 million communications satellite. For NASA, struggling to recover from the loss of the Challenger shuttle 14 months ago, the aborted flight broke a string of seven successful launches since September. The cause was not immediately known, although a leading suspect was lightning...
Next year Great Wall plans to launch its first commercial payload, a Westar 6-S communications satellite for New York-based Terasat. It will transmit television programming and business data for Western Union and other users. The Chinese have also signed an agreement to launch a Swedish satellite, and are holding talks with 17 other nations. For customers who are concerned that China may copy the technology in satellites, Great Wall suggests that they package the payload in a sealed container and send along representatives to escort the cargo to the launch site...
Settling were the families of Mission Commander Francis Scobee, High School Teacher Christa McAuliffe, Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka and Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis. The families, who initiated the talks in August, are expected to receive at least $750,000 each, paid out over several years. In exchange, they have waived their rights to future claims against NASA and its personnel and contractors, including Morton Thiokol, the company that built Challenger's solid-fuel rocket boosters. Last year a Government commission concluded that a failure in one of the boosters caused the orbiter to explode...
...change, the mood at the Kennedy Space Center was upbeat last Friday as a ; Delta rocket carrying a secret military payload for the Star Wars space defense program lifted off flawlessly at 11:08 a.m. "We feel we are back in the groove," said NASA's Delta project manager William Russell. The flight was Delta's first since a rocket was destroyed after lift-off in May. And it was only the second successful major U.S. launch of any kind in six attempts, starting with January's space shuttle Challenger disaster...
While insisting that it faces no immediate crisis, the Air Force deeply regrets its overreliance on the shuttle. "We have learned a lot, the hard way, from the Challenger mess," admits one general. "It was wrong to mix both civilian and military payloads in that unreliable, complicated system." Air Force Major General Donald Kutyna, a member of the Rogers commission, has estimated that even if shuttles resume operation next summer and make an improbable 18 flights a year, there will be a defense-payload backlog of some 45 needed flights...