Word: spacecrafts
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...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...
...their three combustible companions. One was the rust-colored external tank, 154 ft. high, which carried 143,351 gal. of liquid oxygen and 385,265 gal. of liquid hydrogen. Two lines connected the fuels to the orbiter, where they would be mixed at controlled levels to power the spacecraft's engines. The other two companions were the gleaming white boosters, each 149 ft. tall and packed with more than 1.1 million lbs. of solid fuel. Once ignited at lift-off, they would burn uncontrollably until their fuel was spent...
Even then the onboard computer, sensing the slightest glitch, could still abort a launch. As it happened, Resnik had been aboard the shuttle Discovery in June 1984 when, four seconds before the spacecraft's three main engines were to ignite for lift-off, the computer noted that the thrust from one of them was not at the proper level. The fuse was immediately pinched...
...adjacent external tank. This was near the point where the tank is attached to Challenger. Milliseconds later, the fire had flared out and danced upward. Suddenly, there was only a fireball. Piercing shades of orange and yellow and red burst out of a billowing white cloud, engulfing the disintegrating spacecraft...
...months, the teacher and her more experienced crewmates were ready for their multiple mission. McAuliffe's task was to ! conduct two 15-minute classes in space as millions of schoolchildren watched via closed-circuit TV. In one, called "The ultimate field trip," she would conduct a tour of the spacecraft, explaining the duties of each crew member and the facilities on board. The second, titled "Where we've been, where we're going, why?," would stress the scientific, commercial and industrial benefits that have been derived from space travel...