Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Navy and NASA officials would not say if there had been any progress in recovering Challenger's crew cabin, rocket boosters or remains from any of the seven astronauts...
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...
...explosion that destroyed Challenger inevitably evoked memories of an earlier tragedy in America's space program. On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire erupted in the first manned Apollo spacecraft as it sat atop its Saturn 1-B rocket during a test at Cape Kennedy. The blaze killed Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, 40, Edward White, 36, and Roger Chaffee, 31, who until last week were the only astronauts to perish aboard a U.S. spacecraft...
...Challenger. A fleet of 13 vessels, four planes and nine helicopters began searching an area that eventually grew to 6,000 sq. mi. of Atlantic coastal waters, picking up thousands of pounds of wreckage, including a large section of the shuttle's fuselage and the nose of a booster rocket...