Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vividly recalls the only previous tragedy in the U.S. space program. It occurred in 1967, when an Apollo capsule caught fire on the launch pad, and Astronauts Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee perished in the inferno. Only the day before, Morse had been shooting aboard their spacecraft, and his photos of the three men lying strapped in their seats were used by NASA to study the accident that killed them...
...Challenger. Starting some 30 miles off the cape and then spreading out to cover some 6,000 sq. mi., 13 aircraft and more than a dozen recovery vessels joined the search of the conveniently calm Atlantic waters for any evidence that might give clues as to why the spacecraft had exploded...
Despite the obvious devastation of the explosion, searchers began finding surprisingly large parts of the wreckage, the biggest being a 25-ft.- long section of the spacecraft's fuselage. Parts of the shuttle's wings, cabin and cargo-bay door were tentatively identified. Sonar detected a large metal object 140 ft. below the surface, and deep-diving submersibles went down to inspect it. There was speculation that the object might be Challenger's main cabin, although a more likely possibility was that it was one of Challenger's three main engines, which could have fallen in a cluster. But Coast...
...black, a Hawaiian of Japanese descent and three white men. The mission had originally been scheduled to lift off Jan. 20 from NASA's Pad 39-B, which had been refurbished after standing idle since an American crew aboard Apollo 18 left it to dock with a Soviet spacecraft ten years ago. The date slipped to Saturday, Jan. 25, after one of the other three space shuttles, Columbia, ran into delays with a mission that got relatively little notice because such flights had seemed so routine...
...FIERY END of Challenger and her crew is history now, sealed forever into the most uncomfortable corner of our consciousness. Barely a week later, it is as though all of it happened long ago: the remarkably diverse crew walks to the NASA van, the spacecraft lifts majestically skyward, and disaster. A shower of smoke and debris and the booster rockets crazily flailing away, trailing a jagged streamer of cloudy exhaust and diverting us from staring at that ugly fireball. Seven people and man's most magnificent machine, gone in a second. From life to death to nothing. In a second...