Word: rocketted
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...went. Challenger. NASA's Old Faithful. 74 seconds and a fantail of fire. Smoke-chain etched in a stratospheric crucifix. Death in living color in the age of the rocket...
That was the kicker, the great unspoken gaffe: our rocket had blown up. And not just any rocket, but the best that ever was. The space shuttle was the United States' claim to the pinnacle of human achievement...
...couldn't say it. He simply refused to speculate about the causes of the events in the morning's media footage. When Reagan spoke to the nation, he refered to the day's human tragedy and canonized new heroes. One simply couldn't come out and say it: our rocket had blown up. The nation was emasculated, bewildered, dumbstruck as glorious pride turned to impotence in a blinding flash...
...accident defied quick explanation, though a slow-motion replay seemed to show an initial explosion in one of two peel-away rocket boosters igniting the shuttle's huge external fuel tank...
...futurist sensibility took hold, mainstream designers showed some transitional ambivalence: a goofy "electric candle" (1929) on view at the Whitney is unsure if it is supposed to look like a rocket or an actual candle or a tiny fluted Doric column. But the black-paneled Atwater Kent radio from the same period has a machine-age spareness that is, like Fred Astaire, both suave and ingenuous. It is an American synthesis that product design has only lately been recapturing, as in Apple's nubile Macintosh computer...