Word: launchful
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...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" on Jan. 23, just five days before the Challenger launch. Although others still were watching the O rings, Rogers complained that the Marshall memo further reduced the urgency to find...
...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...
...commission hearing. "Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flight--we can lower our standards a bit because we got away with it last time. It's a kind of Russian roulette." In fact, with each pull of the launch trigger, the odds of a catastrophe increased rather than diminished...
...m.p.h. gales, producing, even before the explosion, what one NASA engineer called "an extremely rough ride, maybe the roughest yet." At sea, ships assigned to recover the $25 million boosters were heading for safe harbors as waves broke over their gunwales. All those facts should have been known by launch officials. Yet Challenger was given...
...offers a credible theory. Contends Jerome Lederer, founder of the private Flight Safety Foundation and a onetime NASA safety director: "There was social pressure: they had thousands of school kids watching for the first school lesson from space. There was media pressure: they feared that if they didn't launch, the press would unfavorably report more delays. And there was commercial pressure: the Ariane (European launcher) was putting objects in space at much lower cost. NASA was also trying to show the Air Force that they could operate on a schedule. The pressures were subtle, but they acted upon them...