Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...expects to have the space program restored to at least minimal launch capacity this summer: NASA hopes to use an Atlas-Centaur rocket combination later this month to lift a Navy fleet communications satellite, although the similarity of the electronics in the Atlas engine to those in the failed Delta remains a concern. At the earliest, Delta and Titan could be back in the air in six months. On NASA's part, the agency's newly appointed administrator, James Fletcher, has said he expects to correct the flaws in the shuttle and resume flights by July...
Under any circumstances, Fletcher will be hard-pressed to meet his deadline for relaunching the shuttle. The problems demanding urgent solutions involve far more than redesigning the rocket joint that failed. NASA has identified about 50 potentially dangerous faults that will require remedies before a flight can be scheduled. They range from long-standing braking problems that have made many landings risky ventures to a basic question about the reliability of the orbiter's three main engines. Rogers Commission Member Eugene Covert, a professor of aeronautics at M.I.T., headed a joint government-industry team in the late 1970s that solved...
...Rogers report is expected to detail the extraordinary tale of the now famous O rings, the synthetic-rubber circles, .28 in. thick and 37.5 ft. in circumference, designed to make certain that the superhot gases generated within each solid booster could not escape through the joints of the rocket's segments. When flames did penetrate a rocket joint on Challenger, they ignited the shuttle's external liquid-fuel tank, causing the explosion. The commission will cite the O-ring history not only as the cause of the catastrophe but also as an exemplar of the agency's fatally faulty system...
...managers grew tired of dealing with so many 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...
...first elements of a missile-killing system by the mid-1990s. At that point, Star Wars will require launching objects into space on a scale far beyond anything ever before attempted--up to 50 times the weight of military payloads that were going up when the American shuttles and rockets were flying. How to put all those sensors, computers, laser mirrors, rocket-firing satellite battle stations and even miniature nuclear reactors into the heavens, and at what cost...