Word: spacecraft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...videotape opens with a long shot of the spacecraft climbing steadily into the sky, cuts to a telephoto closeup just seconds before the sudden fireball, then switches to a wider view of the billowing smoke and steam. It was played and replayed countless times, run in slow motion and stop-action, narrated by anchormen and pored over by technical experts. For all the resources and manpower deployed by the news media after Tuesday's shuttle explosion, everything seemed mere annotation to that single two-minute clip...
Like most Americans, television news editors had begun to treat space shuttle flights as routine. Cable News Network, the Atlanta-based all-news channel, was the only network to carry live coverage of the shuttle launch. Correspondent Tom Mintier, narrating the spacecraft's ascent, retreated into shocked silence for several seconds following the blast. Then, after the explosion was confirmed by Mission Control, he announced "what appears to be a major catastrophe in America's space program...
...hours of flying time in 45 types of aircraft, ranging from the experimental X-24B to a Boeing 747 jumbo jet to the Caribou C-7 he flew on combat missions in Viet Nam. Scobee entered astronaut training in 1978 and helped fly the 747 that carried the shuttle spacecraft between ground stations. As pilot of Challenger in 1984, he guided the spacecraft so that fellow crew members could retrieve a broken Solar Max satellite, which was repaired on board and later placed back into orbit. At an in-flight press conference, Scobee and the mission's four other astronauts...
...explosion that destroyed Challenger inevitably evoked memories of an earlier tragedy in America's space program. On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire erupted in the first manned Apollo spacecraft as it sat atop its Saturn 1-B rocket during a test at Cape Kennedy. The blaze killed Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, 40, Edward White, 36, and Roger Chaffee, 31, who until last week were the only astronauts to perish aboard a U.S. spacecraft...
...into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream of pain. "It was horrible," recalled a former NASA official. "We could hear it happening and we were powerless to do anything...