Word: ringed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. But it is hard to read such terse narratives as The Killers and To Have and Have Not without imagining gumshoe tracks leading back to Black Mask magazine...
Poles like to quip that news dispensed by the state falls into three categories: certain (obituaries), probable (the weather) and nonsensical (everything else). On May 31, however, the terse official announcement had the ring of truth: Zbigniew Bujak, a fugitive underground leader of the banned Solidarity trade-union movement, had been arrested after eluding police for more than four years. Only days later, Poles received a second jolt. The Washington Post reported that the Reagan Administration not only knew in advance about the Warsaw regime's plans to impose martial law in December 1981, but according to Polish Government Spokesman...
What did NASA do about its problem? Not much, even though boosters recovered after several flights showed O-ring erosion, indicating that the hot gases were reaching them and threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded...
While the search for a fix proceeded, Bob Ebeling, manager of the booster- ignition system at Morton Thiokol, wrote a plaintive interoffice memo on Oct. 1, 1985, saying, "HELP! The seal task force is constantly being delayed by every possible means . . . The allegiance to the O-ring investigation task force is very limited to a group of engineers numbering 8-10 . . . We wish we could get action by verbal request, but such is not the case. This is a red flag...
...open problems listed for the shuttle that they asked Morton Thiokol to try to winnow the items. Brian Russell, Thiokol's manager of special projects for the boosters, promptly filed a memo last Dec. 6 to the director of the solid-rocket project at Thiokol, recommending that the O-ring erosion be dropped from the critical- problems list. Mysteriously, an unsigned paper produced by Marshall's problem- assessment system declared that "this problem is considered closed" on Jan. 23, just five days before the Challenger launch. Although others still were watching the O rings, Rogers complained that the Marshall memo...