Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WASHINGTON -- Top NASA officials who gave the go-ahead to launch the ill-fated Challenger mission were never told of a low temperature reading of 7 to 9 degrees on the shuttle's right booster rocket prior to liftoff, according to the space agency...
...temperature on the morning of the Jan. 28 launch has been a focus of a presidential commission's investigation into the shuttle accident because of concern that the cold might have affected the performance of critical O-ring seals between segments of the shuttle's two rocket boosters...
...presidential commission, said he does not believe the low temperature readings were caused by a cold hydrogen leak. In Wednesday's editions of the Washington Post, he said the readings could have been a result of breezes blowing past the cold external fuel tank onto the booster rocket...
NASA officials conferred by telephone with Thiokol experts on the day before the launch, said Judson Lovingood, deputy shuttle manager at Marshall Space Flight Center. Their concern, however, was not with the fuel, but with the cold affecting the O rings that seal the rocket joints. After these talks, Lovingood told the commission, "Thiokol recommended to proceed" with the flight. Privately, experts explained that gaps in the seals or cracks in the fuel mixture could allow the hot exhaust gases within the booster to reach the rocket's outer steel casing and burn through it. Another possibility was that...
...Rockwell have all been working on the conceptual designs for a space plane. At the moment, says one industry consultant, "it's just a gleam in everyone's eye." But what a gleam: the plane would take off on a conventional runway and fly into orbit like a rocket. It could launch satellites, much as the space shuttle has done, or it could simply whisk U.S. passengers from coast to coast in twelve minutes. Such staggering speed would only be possible with a new kind of engine that could function both in the atmosphere and in space...