Word: spacecrafts
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...NASA report on fire and blast hazards in spacecraft atmospheres noted that materials which were not highly combustible in a normal atmosphere erupted into flames during the Philadelphia blaze. Critics' suspicions seemed tragically justified last week when two airmen perished in a fire that flashed through the pure-oxygen atmosphere of a sealed test chamber at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at San Antonio. The difficult decision now facing NASA is whether or not to continue to provide American astronauts with a pure-oxygen atmosphere...
...other hand, an oxygen-nitrogen system has serious drawbacks for space flights. The additional storage tanks, valves, tubing and instruments necessary to blend and monitor a two-gas atmosphere would add an estimated 500 lbs. to a spacecraft the size of the Apollo...
...decided in the late 1950s that a space-mission failure was more likely to occur because of the added complexity and weight of a two-gas system than because of the fire hazard of a pure-oxygen system. Designers spared no efforts to fireproof the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft. All electrical wiring was coated with noncombustible materials. Devices capable of sending out sparks were placed in sealed boxes. Space suits, seats, instruments and cabin walls were all designed to avoid the generation of static electricity...
...more than seven years, during 1,024 hours of successful space flight and thousands of ground tests in pure-oxygen atmospheres, NASA's reasoning seemed sound. There was no apparent need for conversion to a two-gas system-a conversion that would require the complete redesign of the spacecraft and could set the Apollo program back two years. But in 14 terrible seconds at Cape Kennedy, NASA's carefully considered decision has been thrown open to question...
...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...