Word: spacecraft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...somber eulogies were the only form of tribute left to offer Grissom, White and Chaffee. But to the stunned technicians of the Apollo program, there could be no more fitting service to the astronauts-the quick and the dead-than an exhaustive in quest on the burned-out spacecraft. To that end, a board of inquiry, headed by Floyd L. Thompson, director of NASA's Langley Research Center near Hampton, Va., embarked on an excruciatingly intricate search to discover the cause of the fatal blast...
...poring over the soot-coated, grey-scorched dials, tubes and toggle switches of the instrument panel. The outer surface of the capsule was blistered and blackened in places, evidence that the blaze somehow erupted through the light skin of the airtight craft. The board ordered another, partially completed Apollo spacecraft flown to Cape Kennedy from North American Aviation's plant in Downey, Calif., so that investigators could compare its components with the blackened debris scattered about the ruined craft...
...caused the fire. Whatever the outcome, an Apollo flight will almost certainly be delayed for six months. Meanwhile, as engineers probed the wreckage of Apollo 204, technicians on the sterilized assembly line at North American Aviation's Downey plant worked overtime to put the finishing touches on the spacecraft that will eventually become Apollo...
...reported that four days before the test, there was an apparent short circuit in the ship's system. And moments before the fire burst out in the cockpit, the telemetry readings in Houston reportedly showed a sudden jump in battery temperatures. The obvious possibility was that the spacecraft's circuits may have been overloaded, triggering a spark somewhere and maybe even setting fire to the supposedly heat-resistant wire insulation. But Seamans said that "up to this time," it did not seem that the power source, "whether simulated internal or external, was related to the accident...
...Chris Kraft, director of NASA Flight Operations: "After the canned man and the monkey flights, we found that by adding a man, you've added a tremendous tool. We now have man in the loop-and that's made the difference." Without a man on board a spacecraft, there is no judgment aloft, no freedom of choice, no chance to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, less chance than ever of getting past unforeseen trouble. Ranger's pictures of the moon, spectacular though they were, contain only 500,000 "bits" of information; the human eye with one glance...