Word: launchful
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News organizations had their own complaints. In what NASA said was an effort to gather evidence for its investi gation, authorities impounded all press film from remote-controlled still cameras that had been stationed around the launch site. Several news organizations have protested the action. In ad dition, some veteran reporters of the space program were rankled at the virtual news blackout imposed by NASA after the accident...
Grissom, the second American in space, White, who made the first U.S. space walk, and Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, had 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...
Then there were all those pictures that the whole nation had seen, over and over again, and that the experts now had to study, in slow motion and with computer enhancements, over and over again. NASA not only had 80 of its own cameras filming the Challenger launch, but it impounded all the film in 90 remote-control cameras that various news organizations (including TIME) had installed near the launch...
Finally, there were the billions of signals sent between the doomed shuttle and NASA computers at Cape Canaveral's Launch Control and in Houston's Mission Control before and during the 73 seconds of its flight. The shuttle contained an extraordinary array of monitoring devices (sensors to detect pressures, temperatures, fuel flow, and so on), which reported their findings thousands of times a second. This flow of information, or telemetry, was so constant and so enormous that a lot of it was not sent either to the shuttle cockpit or to the consoles at Launch and Mission controls. Instead...
...that ice, which had formed on Launch Pad 39-B during Cape Canaveral's 27 degrees F weather the night before the lift-off, had somehow damaged the shuttle. In fact, engineers at Rockwell International, the prime contractor for the shuttle, saw the ice in televised shots of Pad 39-B and telephoned NASA to urge a delay in the launch. But Space Flight Director Moore said that an "ice team" had inspected the shuttle. "We checked just 20 minutes prior to launch, and the consensus of the reports was good," he said. "It was decided that very low risk...