Word: rocketting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Challenger. This isn't the first time Art has beaten Life to the pages of Newsweek; remember The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island. And it won't be the last. In the years prior to this week's tragedy, NASA had been straining its PR muscles, turning a rocket-powered bronco ride into what had begun to seem like a drive in the country. There had been so many shuttle flights flashing across our skies and our screens; they had become the norm, not the extraordinary exception...
...interests of RCA corporate chiefs and Star Wars fanatics alike. It would, of course, be hard to advocate putting millions of dollars of technology into space if the transport were to blow up every twenty trips or so. The point is, after all, that the shuttle was not a rocket, not a missile with a sardine-can-like warhead of astronauts. In the public mind, its very essence was "to shuttle," to safely carry human beings into space--and back again. The shuttle was in this sense a symbol of security that belied the otherwise well-recognized dangers...
Also found were two cone-shaped objects described as "about 10 feet" in diameter. One had an attached parachute, indicating it came from one of the solid rocket boosters blown up. Each booster is 12 feet in diameter and contains four parachutes designed to lower the spent rockets to the ocean for retrieval...
Officials said the tapes might be the most crucial piece of evidence in the investigation. They could reveal whether the fireball was caused by something that went wrong with the spaceship's huge external fuel tank or whether the fault lay with one of the two solid fuel rocket boosters...
...robots have a harder time capturing the public's imagination by exhibiting the "right stuff," the courage to sit atop a giant rocket and be hurled into space...