He asks his people to collect some figures on heat transfer to get a predicted temperature of the booster joints. Attack it like any other engineering task. Challenger is scheduled to lift off early the next day, and this problem of cold affecting the joints between the booster’s segments is far from resolved. The supervisor of rocket motor cases for Morton Thiokol, Thompson thinks right away about the seals on the solid rocket boosters. It’s Boyd Brinton, a colleague, calling from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The phone rings in Arnold Thompson’s office at the Morton Thiokol Inc. Shuttle contractors are facing this trouble for the first time. Grove owners prepare for a long night, but they’ve handled freezes before. And they switch on the shuttle’s heaters. The water is used to cool the tower after liftoff and flood the pad to suppress damaging sound waves at ignition. But NASA workers do not have time to drain the 300,000 gallons of water at the launch pad. More than 1,500 acres of oranges, grapefruit, tangelos and tangerines grow around it on government land under lease to private growers.Ĭitrus workers nearby start flooding ditches around their groves at KSC. Outside the control center, rows of fruit trees edge up within a mile of the building. NASA asks its shuttle contractors to assemble any pertinent data for what looks to be the coldest launch ever. And this is to be NASA’s most ambitious year: 15 shuttle missions are planned.Īs the crowd leaves the viewing stands, NASA’s mission management team convenes inside the launch control building to plan tomorrow’s try. It follows seven launch postponements in December and January for Columbia. It is the sixth launch postponement for Challenger. They’ll try again tomorrow - Tuesday morning.ĭrained from almost five hours of waiting inside the shuttle, stiff from sitting on the hard seats with their legs up, crew members drag themselves out of the orbiter. Shortly before 1 p.m., Mission Control tells the crew to climb down. They whip to 30 mph - too dangerous in case the shuttle has to make an emergency landing before entering orbit. Just as it comes off, though, the winds start up. With a hacksaw, they finally cut the bolt off. Then a second drill can’t complete the job. Then the drill they manage to find fails. Then a bolt sticks on the shuttle’s hatch. And, back at Concord High, where McAuliffe teaches social studies, the 1,200 students are ready with party hats and noisemakers. The students visiting from the Concord, N.H., high school are bursting with tension. The third-graders from young Scott McAuliffe’s class are fidgety while they wait outside at KSC. They believe in her mission to humanize space.īut everyone grows a little tired from sustaining the thrill through so many delays. They are confident, and they are proud of Christa, who was picked from among 11,400 teacher applicants. A third freeze will strike the deathblow to thousands of citrus acres. They flood their groves with warm groundwater. ”Īcross the state, citrus workers scramble, hauling out fuel-oil heaters and preparing to move them into the fields. All possible precautions should be taken. This could be a major freeze on a par with the Christmas 1983 freeze and January freeze of last year. ”Temperatures may approach all-time record lows. Citrus growers on the Space Coast, who often pause in their groves to watch the shuttle roar above their treetops, are stopping now to hear the National Weather Service bulletin: Just hours away from Florida, though, glacial winds are coating the country with ice. It is a brisk and clear Monday, in the 50s, and the sun is shining on friends and relatives of the space shuttle Challenger’s seven crew members. In the grandstands at Kennedy Space Center, the crowd waits for the countdown to tick along.
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