Word: tankful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time of the launch the air temperature had risen to 38 degrees, but a dramatically lower temperature on the surface of the booster might have been an indication that supercold liquid hydrogen was leaking from the huge external fuel tank, investigators...
Richard Feynman, a physicist on the presidential commission, said he does not believe the low temperature readings were caused by a cold hydrogen leak. In Wednesday's editions of the Washington Post, he said the readings could have been a result of breezes blowing past the cold external fuel tank onto the booster rocket...
...Although NASA's acting administrator, William Graham, said the flame's location had not been pinpointed, it appeared to be about 36 ft. above the bottom of the rocket's nozzle, near an attachment ring where the lower part of the booster was connected to the external liquid-fuel tank. This ring, in turn, was just above one of the three special joints coupling the rocket's stacked solid-fuel segments. Externally, 177 high-strength steel pins held these joints together. Internally the joints were sealed with two large rubber O rings...
...controllers and astronauts had only 13 seconds to discover the problem and react. But NASA officials testified that escape would have been impossible in any case. Arnold Aldrich, shuttle manager at the Johnson Space Center, told the commissioners that Challenger could not have separated from the boosters and the tank until the solid-fuel rockets had completed their uncontrolled firing, about two minutes after lift-off. Any earlier separation, he said, would have thrown the shuttle into the wake of the powerful rocket motors, a situation that "is thought to be unsurvivable...
...casing and burn through it. Another possibility was that the flame-retarding material between the booster sections could have loosened under the wide variations in temperature, providing another route for a burnthrough. Most analysts assume that once the flame sliced through the rocket casing, it reached the liquid-fuel tank, burning through either the tank's wall or the connecting fuel lines, touching off the massive explosion...