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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (19979)	2/1/2008 1:55:14 PM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 36918

Did they measure the temperature of the outside air before the launch? Approximately one year before the Challenger flight, the solid-fuel booster rockets were being refitted after use in an earlier launch when it was noticed that about a third of several of the O-rings had been severely corroded. This indicated that there had been significant leakage of combustion gases through the joints. The investigating engineers also noted that just before launch time the air temperature was around 53 degrees Fahrenheit (the lowest launch temperature up to that point in the space shuttle program). After some internal squabbling the manufacturer of the booster rockets, Morton Thiokol, formed an engineering team to investigate the O-ring design. By April 1985 this team had carried out experiments and reported that the O-rings' resiliency decreased dramatically below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. On the night before the Challenger launch, the temperature was around 28 degrees Fahrenheit. objectivistcenter.org