Word: launchpads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nelson. "He's the ideal commander." Hauck has flown on two previous shuttle missions. One, which he commanded, was the 1984 Discovery mission to retrieve two wayward satellites. He has not lost a sense of wonder about the shuttle: "It's kind of mystical being out there on the launchpad listening to the sounds. It seems like a breathing, alive machine." A graduate of Tufts University and a Navy combat pilot in Southeast Asia, Hauck planned to take Beatles and Billy Joel tapes on Discovery. He and his wife Dolly have two adult children, Whitney and Stephen. Hauck, a water...
...Hilmers, 38, mission specialist. Jan. 28, 1986, was Hilmers' 36th birthday. But it was no time for celebrating: that was the day Challenger disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Ever since, Hilmers has had a dream that "one day a shuttle would once again make its way to the launchpad to launch Americans into space." A religious man, he says his anxiety about the mission was "soothed by my faith in God." Hilmers, who doubles as Covey's backup pilot, is a math whiz. He graduated summa cum laude from Cornell College, in Iowa, and earned an electrical-engineering degree...
...most of the millions who witnessed Discovery's lift-off, the spacecraft on the launchpad looked little different from its ill-fated predecessor, Challenger. But the similarity was only skin deep. Responding to the recommendations of the Rogers commission, the 13-member panel appointed by the White House to investigate the causes of the Challenger tragedy, NASA spent $2.4 billion redesigning and replacing crucial components of its shuttle fleet. Over the past two years, the space agency has made more than 400 changes in the winged orbiter -- including a much touted new escape system -- the solid rocket boosters, the orbiter...
...there were reports of an enormous but still unacknowledged disaster: a giant Soviet booster was said to have exploded on the launchpad, killing hundreds of technicians, along with high-ranking Soviet military officers...