Word: launchful
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Then, on April 18, a Titan 34D rocket blew up on launch at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base while trying to lift a Big Bird photo reconnaissance satellite into orbit. And just two days before the anniversary ceremonies were held last week, yet another U.S. space failure occurred: the main engine of a $30 million Delta rocket carrying a $57.5 million weather satellite shut down just 71 seconds after lift-off from Cape Canaveral. The Delta was destroyed by ground command. "We like to feel we're infallible," Shuttle Astronaut Bob ) Crippen told the subdued workers at the cape...
...suffered three consecutive launch disasters, not counting the failure of a small Nike-Orion rocket on April 25, disclosed by the Associated Press last week. That adds up to the worst string of failures since the early days of the space program. Democratic Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee saw more than bad luck at work. Said he: "There may be a quality-control problem at NASA." Gore revealed that the space agency had slashed 70% of the personnel assigned to monitor the quality of its work between 1970 and 1985. Still, the Titan failure, as well as a Titan explosion...
...were merely coincidental or shared some human failing was not clear. A poorly designed joint in the shuttle's boosters, coupled with the refusal of officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the rockets were developed, to heed engineers' warnings about the cold weather at launch time, presumably will be cited by a presidential commission as contributing to that catastrophe. The commission disclosed last week that just five days before the disaster, the Marshall managers had virtually dismissed the recurring flaws in the joint, deciding in an unsigned internal memo that "this problem is considered closed...
...failures leave the U.S. temporarily without any means of getting medium to heavy payloads into orbit. "It wasn't very long ago when people were talking about there being too many satellites," says Ivy Hooks, a former NASA engineer. "When you suddenly can't launch them, you realize how critical the weather, spy and communications satellites...
...road to the Tokyo summit, Reagan promotes democracy during a sometimes stormy stopover in Bali. As Challenger' s crew is laid to rest, nasa is rocked by another explosion on launch. Polls still show "undecided" leading a crowded field for California' s Republican Senate nomination. In Michigan, Bush and Kemp are already scrambling for delegates...