Word: plumes
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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...
...that seemingly fatal plume developed on the booster's side? The panelists kept asking about the unusually cold weather at the launch site. The temperature had dropped to 24 degrees F early 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...
Recovery of the shuttle's right solid fuel rocket booster is particularly important because speculation about the cause of the explosion currently centers on it. Videotape and still photos taken after launch show a plume of fire shooting out from its side toward the external fuel tank, which blew up into a giant fireball...
NASA's long-range television cameras had been following Challenger's shiny * white rocket plume, recording the graceful roll that had awed the spectators. But then the cameras caught an ominously unfamiliar sight, imperceptible to those below. However different those photographs later looked to viewers of the endless taped replays, NASA analysts said that an orange glow had first flickered just past the center of the orbiter, between the shuttle's belly and the adjacent external tank. This was near the point where the tank is attached to Challenger. Milliseconds later, the fire had flared out and danced upward. Suddenly...
...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 from an apparently enlarging gap in the side of the right booster immediately before the explosion. That seemed to be strong evidence...