Word: thiokol
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Post also said that, "at the urging of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration," officials of booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol agreed to the cold-weather launch on the eve of liftoff after twice recommending against...
...Even at that point, however, a senior Thiokol official at Cape Canaveral refused to endorse the recommendation," the Post quoted an unidentified commission member as saying. "This shook us to the socks. We were unprepared for it. It changed the whole tone of the investigation...
...gone through what meteorologists call a "cold soak," conditions more severe than those at any of the previous 24 shuttle launches. NASA manuals say that the solid fuel in a booster should be ignited only when the rubber-like mixture is between 40 degrees and 90 degrees . Morton Thiokol, the rocket manufacturer, also specifies that the fuel's temperature should never be allowed to fall below freezing. The insulated boosters contain no internal heat sensors, but NASA technicians calculated the mean temperature to be 55 degrees...
NASA officials conferred by telephone with Thiokol experts on the day before the launch, said Judson Lovingood, deputy shuttle manager at Marshall Space Flight Center. Their concern, however, was not with the fuel, but with the cold affecting the O rings that seal the rocket joints. After these talks, Lovingood told the commission, "Thiokol recommended to proceed" with the flight. Privately, experts explained that gaps in the seals or cracks in the fuel mixture could allow the hot exhaust gases within the booster to reach the rocket's outer steel casing and burn through it. Another possibility was that...
When the Columbia space shuttle rises from its Kennedy Space Center launch pad this week, some anxious businessmen in the U.S. and Canada will be glued to their television sets, and not just to marvel as the reusable spacecraft's twin Thiokol rockets thrust it up and over the blue Atlantic. The launch, fifth in the Columbia series, will be the first in which the shuttle begins earning money from private, corporate customers for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration...