Test boosts Thiokol's shuttle readiness

PROMONTORY, Box Elder County — As the countdown progressed over loudspeakers, a car began to honk out the passing seconds. Some of the hundreds of schoolchildren, standing beside their yellow buses, chanted, "Four! Three! Two! One!"

A dazzling white metallic flame shot from a horizontal rocket motor on a distant hillside. Onlookers gasped, a startled "Ohhhhh." Eight seconds later, they were slammed by a loud crackling, rumbling roar.

Waves of sound continued, waxing and waning, while the long streak of fire blazed white and orange. Two giant clouds, white toward the rocket motor and brown at the far end, billowed above the hillside and cast a shadow on the hill. Pulsations of shock waves fluttered against the cloud of dust and smoke.

After two minutes, the flame retracted and the smoke pouring from the motor diminished, turning back and gray. The big man-made clouds kept rising in the clear blue sky. Watchers began to whoop, applaud and whistle.

NASA's space shuttle program had "successfully fired its first Flight Verification Motor," a space agency news release announced later in the day.

The scene was the public viewing area beside U-83, where interested Utahns, NASA officials, at least one astronaut, media representatives and ATK Thiokol employees experienced the static test firing. Held on Thiokol property, the test was to check hundreds of attributes of the solid rocket booster that helps lift the space shuttle toward orbit.

Two of the 126-foot solid rocket motors perform the job of boosting the shuttle toward space, and they are crucial to the shuttle flights. The main test Thursday was to check whether such a rocket would perform well toward the end of its shelf life.

"It's very impressive," Michael C. Kostelnik, deputy associate administrator of NASA for the space station and shuttle, said shortly after Thursday's firing.

"It ran about the right amount of time and seemed to be good, down here. Of course, the experts will have to take a look at it. But it's an important day for the solid (rocket) part of our team."

According to Kostelnik, a retired Air Force major general, the test was "very important to our return-to-flight efforts." The motor was about four years old, a month older than the one that is being prepared for Discovery's return to space.

NASA is nearing the end of a lengthy list of changes and repairs required for its return to human spaceflight, following the Columbia disaster of Feb. 1, 2003, which cost the lives of all seven astronauts aboard. The shuttle program has been grounded meanwhile.