Word: sealing
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...former Secretary of State William Rogers, discovered NASA itself was deeply flawed. Far from representing the best of American know-how, the twelve-member commission found, NASA had become a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Before the first shuttle was launched, the agency had known of the fatal seal problem but had buried it under a blizzard of paper while permitting schedule-conscious managers to keep the orbiters flying. In retrospect, it began to seem, the Challenger tragedy was all but inevitable...
...tracked the O-ring problem on paper since 1978, some three years before the first shuttle flight, on April 12, 1981. As early as Jan. 19, 1979, John Q. Miller, chief of the solid motor branch at Marshall, where the boosters were developed, complained to his superiors that the seal was functioning "in a way which violates industry and Government O-ring application practices." On May 29, 1980, a NASA engineering panel noted that the O rings had failed in a ground test and called them "inadequate" for reliability and "marginal" in their safety. On Feb. 28, 1984, Miller warned...
What did NASA do about its problem? Not much, even though boosters recovered after several flights showed O-ring erosion, indicating that the hot gases were reaching them and threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded...
...entering the Senate chamber shortly before 4 p.m. last Wednesday, White House Courier Tim Saunders suddenly became the Invisible Man. Not that anyone actually failed to see him, or to guess what he was carrying in a manila envelope decorated with the White House seal. With Saunders in plain view, Majority Leader Robert Dole archly informed fellow Senators that Ronald Reagan had vetoed an attempt by Congress to block a sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, and * "somewhere there is a messenger who has that information." But the moment Saunders' presence was officially acknowledged, the veto would become the pending...
Thousands of laborers set about sealing off the reactor and cleaning up nearby areas last week. Helicopters continued to drop tons of sand, lead and boron onto the reactor each day to keep radiation from reaching the air. On the ground, crews worked to seal off the 570 degrees mass from the soil and water below. The news agency TASS reported that at one crucial point, three men in protective garments dove into a pool that had collected beneath the reactor and opened valves to let the water out. That ended the danger that the reactor could fall into...