Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...initial progress of the Iraqi counteroffensive was painfully slow. Iraqi tanks on the open salt flats were hampered by the marshy, rain-soaked terrain. Pilots, seeking to avoid loss of aircraft, flew too high for effective bombing. Only with the aid of intense cover fire from helicopter gunships and rocket launchers, whose missiles threw up sheets of flame in the Iranian lines, did the Iraqis advance at all. Confronted by this "moving wall of fire," as one eyewitness described it, the 50,000-man invasion force took huge casualties but did not flee...
...explosion of space shuttle Challenger were upstaged last week by a steady stream of disclosures. First, the New York Times revealed that NASA internal documents had long ago warned about problems with the crucial O rings, the two giant synthetic-rubber washers that seal each joint between the booster-rocket segments. Next, an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology spelled out in extraordinary detail how the starboard booster had caused Challenger's external liquid-fuel tank to explode. Then, NASA released pictures showing a mysterious puff of black smoke apparently emerging from the booster at lift- off. The 13-member...
...rings, already suspect, were spotlighted early in the week when the Times printed details of memos leaked by an unnamed solid-fuel rocket expert. One document, written last July by Richard Cook, an agency budget analyst, noted that booster O rings had shown signs of charring on previous missions and could lead to a "catastrophic" situation...
Nearly everyone, including the space agency, seemed to be zeroing in on a failure of the right booster rocket, probably at its bottom joint, as the event that initiated the tragedy. The puff of black smoke seen in the NASA photographs and videotape lends support to theories that an O ring was at fault. According to a flight "time-line" compiled by NASA and released at week's end the smoke first appeared .445 seconds after booster ignition. It swirled between the rocket and the external tank, near where the fatal burnthrough seems to have occurred. One solid-rocket specialist...
...week's end, as NASA continued to maintain a stiff upper lip about both the rocket's defects and the shuttle's future, Rogers issued a terse but devastating statement: he had advised the President that after only one week of hearings, the commission "has found that the process (of decision making leading up to Challenger's launch) may have been flawed." As a result, NASA was being asked to exclude those of its personnel involved in the launch from any further role on the investigating teams...