Word: launchful
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...last week the atmosphere, and NASA's image, had changed. After declaring that NASA's procedure for deciding whether to launch Challenger "may have been flawed," Rogers demanded that no NASA official involved in that decision take further part in the space agency's own investigation. And word leaked out that Rogers had told the White House he had been "appalled" by the way the launch decision had been made. At a public hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings said of the disaster: "At this particular juncture it seems like...
...commission had grilled top NASA officials as well as engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that makes the solid-fuel boosters suspected of triggering the disaster. The commissioners could scarcely believe what they were hearing as they made some startling discoveries: 1) the engineers had adamantly opposed the launch because of the unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral; 2) on the morning of the tragedy, an infrared temperature-sensing instrument had shown abnormal "cold spots" of 7 degrees and 9 degrees F on the lower part of the right-hand booster; and 3) most unsettling of all, neither...
There was a stunned silence in the commission's closed hearing room at the cape after Robert Sieck, shuttle manager at the Kennedy Space Center, Gene Thomas, the launch director for Challenger at Kennedy, and Arnold Aldrich, manager of space transportation systems at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, all testified that they had never before heard that Thiokol engineers had objected to the launch. Rogers ordered everyone except the commissioners out of the room and declared, "We must advise the President as soon as possible." Explained one commission source: "We did not want the President to be blindsided...
...external tank, which contains supercold liquid oxygen (-297 degrees ) and hydrogen (-423 degrees ) had not been abnormally cold, casting doubt on a theory that liquid fuel, leaking unnoticed from the tank, had chilled the nearby booster. He also discovered that the wind on the morning of the launch had been blowing across the cold surface of the tank toward the right booster. As one NASA engineer explained, "Even a slight breeze, wafting over the external tank full of those cryogens (supercold fluids) may have been enough to produce lower temperatures on the right-hand solid rocket booster than...
Incredible as it may seem, Shuttle Director Moore also had been one of the officials who were never told of the heated opposition to the launch by Thiokol engineers or the discovery of the booster's cold spots. Asked by the Senate subcommittee what he would have done if he had known about the cold spots, Moore replied, "I would have asked more questions about what the readings indicated." Said Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore Jr.: "The record calls into question the way alarm bells are rung and heard" at NASA...