Word: countdowns
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European space officials watched nervously last week as a gleaming white Ariane 3 rocket awaited the final seconds of countdown on its jungle-ringed launching pad in French Guiana. While the Ariane program has generally been a success, three of its 16 missions since 1979 have ended in costly accidents. This time the European Space Agency's unmanned craft carried a payload of two satellites worth a total of $200 million: G-Star II, owned by the U.S. communications company GTE, and Brasilsat S2, a Brazilian counterpart. The countdown ran smoothly until just 4.9 seconds before ignition, but then...
...minutes before the scheduled lift-off, they made another check. A Rockwell engineer in California, watching by closed-circuit TV, telephoned the cape to urge a delay because of the ice. But Kennedy Space Center Director Richard Smith, having been advised that there was little risk, permitted the countdown to continue...
Shivering reporters, photographers, schoolchildren and other spectators cheered. The countdown was past the point where it had stopped the day before. The mission designed to show that space belonged to everyone finally seemed ready to launch both its schoolteacher and the dreams of the children participating vicariously from their schools. On Challenger's flight deck, roughly the size of a Boeing 747's, Scobee and Smith continued to run through their elaborate checklists. The orbiter's main computer, supported by four backups, continuously scanned all the data from some 2,000 sensors and data points. They would shut down...
...motorists in the cape area, listening to their radios, pulled off highways and faced the ocean. On Challenger's middeck, Onizuka, Jarvis and McAuliffe had nothing to do except wait. At dozens of points around the globe, radar tracking stations had now synchronized their antenna systems with the countdown sequence in Florida...
...been scheduled to run through a simulated Apollo launch. Suited up, they clambered into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream of pain. "It was horrible," recalled a former NASA official. "We could hear it happening and we were powerless...