Word: rubbers
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Cleverly crafted out of latex and foam rubber, the cast of caricatures ranges from Ronald and Nancy Reagan to Barbra Streisand, from William ("the Refrigerator") Perry to Charles Bronson, from Walter Cronkite to David Frost. Oops, Frost is actually the only real person featured on a special version of Spitting Image, the weekly satirical show of puppets and circumstances that is one of Britain's most talked-about TV programs. The two-year-old series is either adored or abhorred for such presentations as a Christmastime satire of the royal family regally addled by holiday cheer. Last week work...
...hearings did make it clear that there had long been doubts about the reliability of the seals at the three joints between the booster rocket's four main segments. Attention remained focused on the two large synthetic rubber O rings set in grooves and designed, like washers in a faucet, to keep the rocket's superhot gases from escaping out the joints...
...where Americans of all persuasions clamor to be heard. Movie stars plead on behalf of disease prevention, Catholic clerics inveigh against abortion, farmers in overalls ask for extended credit, Wall Street financiers extol the virtues of lower capital-gains taxes. No single group dominates. When the steel, auto and rubber industries saw the Reagan Administration as an opening to weaken the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, the "Green Lobby," a coalition of environmental groups, was able to stop them...
...most rocket experts, the telltale black smoke meant that right from the start, at least one of the two synthetic rubber O rings that were meant to seal the joint between the rocket's segments had begun to burn. Roughly a quarter-inch thick and 37.5 ft. in circumference, the large O rings rest in grooves at the three joints. Like the washers that prevent faucets from leaking, they are designed to keep the rocket's exhaust gases from escaping through any gaps in the joints. These are especially vulnerable under the immense forces generated at lift-off (the entire...
...blue-ribbon commission charged with investigating the 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...