Word: launchful
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...Reagan Administration has already started to reverse a disastrous decision made in 1972 by the Nixon Administration to develop the shuttle as the sole vehicle for putting both humans and payloads into orbit. Instead, the U.S. will move to a mixed launch fleet including both shuttles and expendable rockets. Ten new advanced Titan 34D7 rockets are already on order, and the Air Force wants at least ten more to provide an increased launching capability beginning in 1988. Within a week or so, a National Security Council-led Interagency Group on Space is expected to recommend that NASA severely restrict...
...develop, have been designed for shuttle deployment. Not only the Pentagon but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and numerous private communications companies are eager for NASA to resume shuttle operations. So is the agency, which has already lost some $200 million in fees it would have collected from launch contracts that it has been forced to cancel since the Challenger disaster...
...revive public confidence in the agency. The expected tone was indicated by one commission member, who told TIME, "The system suffered a breakdown under the people in charge." Confronted with tighter budgets and more demands, he said, "they skimped and made do in the wrong places--and that includes launch safety." Indeed, Tennessee Senator Albert Gore released a study showing that NASA had trimmed 70% of its safety and quality-control staff in recent years...
...erosion, indicating that the hot gases were reaching them and threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded in a postflight summary that "low temperature enhanced probability" of seal erosion. After testing the resiliency of the rings at various...
There was yet another roadblock to action: despite the documents, top flight officials at Marshall, including Mulloy, believed that the seal had redundancy in the critical early stages of ignition. Dutifully, however, Mulloy slapped a formal launch constraint on the joint problem. That meant that there could be no shuttle flight until the seal was fixed. But few above Mulloy even knew the constraint existed; worse yet, having imposed the restraint, Mulloy routinely waived it before each launch. So the shuttles flew, its astronauts innocently unaware of the lingering joint danger...