Word: thiokol
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans react differently to these matters. After the leaky booster rocket made by his company caused Challenger to explode, the chairman of Morton Thiokol was asked if he should have resigned. His name is Charles S. Locke. Here is what Mr. Locke said: "You explain to me why I should...
...Challenger and to incorporate a design that won't allow that to happen again," said John Thomas, who headed the modification effort at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Formal adoption, which might take months, will hinge on exhaustive tests by both the agency and booster contractor Morton Thiokol...
...proposal has the advantage of using booster sections that already exist, and the primary alterations will be made only at the joints. So testing could begin at Morton Thiokol's Brigham City, Utah, plant later this month. But starting from scratch is still under consideration. Says Thomas: "The solid-rocket industry is to provide, by the end of October, a clean-sheet design (of solid boosters), which means that they are not constrained to existing hardware." Rebuilding the existing boosters, however, now seems the most likely solution, especially since it has the best chance of meeting NASA's current takeoff...
Then came yet another bizarre twist in NASA's paper shuffle. The Marshall managers grew tired of dealing with so many open problems listed for the shuttle that they asked Morton Thiokol to try to winnow the items. Brian Russell, Thiokol's manager of special projects for the boosters, promptly filed a memo last Dec. 6 to the director of the solid-rocket project at Thiokol, recommending that the O-ring erosion be dropped from the critical- problems list. Mysteriously, an unsigned paper produced by Marshall's problem- assessment system declared that "this problem is considered closed...
...joint's troubled history was completely dismissed on the eve of Challenger's launch. The seals had long been flagged as a problem that could be aggravated by low temperatures. Yet George Hardy, Marshall's deputy director of science and engineering, declared that he was "appalled" by Thiokol's reasoning that the cape's cold weather, predicted to be in the 30s at lift-off, should lead to a delay. In the now notorious teleconference, four Thiokol vice presidents at first concurred with the fears of their engineers. But when they heard the NASA objections, they decided to take...