Word: tankful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pilot Smith was given the order to prestart the auxiliary power units that would operate Challenger's control surfaces and swivel its engine nozzles. The last pints of oxygen were pumped into the external tank...
...Roger, roll Challenger," acknowledged Mission Control's Richard Covey in the professional tones of all air controllers. Like a fly clinging to a caterpillar, the shuttle turned gracefully on its back as the tank and the boosters assumed the proper downrange course for entering orbit...
...cameras caught an ominously unfamiliar sight, imperceptible to those below. However different those photographs later looked to viewers of the endless taped replays, NASA analysts said that an orange glow had first flickered just past the center of the orbiter, between the shuttle's belly and the 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...
...J.P.L. experts interpret the tape as showing a bright sphere of flame appearing well above one of the boosters' lower skirts. It is on the interior side, facing the external tank and pointing away from the orbiter. A fraction of a second later, the sphere of flame becomes a cone-shaped jet of fire. The pointed end of the cone emerges from the booster, and its rounded end seems to aim at the fuel tank, apparently burning a hole in its side. The next thing to be seen is the huge fireball, engulfing everything...
Still, the way the boosters continued flying after the explosion prompted some experts to reject the likelihood of a burnthrough in either one. Hurled away from the exploding external tank, both rockets appeared to be moving rather stably, producing the awesome Y-shaped pattern that millions of Americans will never forget. A burnthrough on the side of the casing, several rocket specialists say, would have sent the booster cartwheeling wildly through space. Bob Truax, a retired engineer who directed the Thor missile program in the 1950s, agrees. "After the explosion, they were continuing on a fairly normal trajectory," he says...