Thiokol has set its most ambitious expansion for next week: a merger with Reaction Motors Inc., a major maker of liquid-fuel rocket engines (TIME, May 27), owned 49% by Olin Mathieson Chemical ...

Constructed by the aerospace firm Morton Thiokol in Utah, each rocket consisted of separate segments of steel tubing filled with fuel and bolted together, the joints sealed with a pair of rubber ...

By January 1985, a year before the Challenger explosion, Roger Boisjoly, a Thiokol engineer who “knew the O-rings better than anyone,” was telling his colleagues that low temperatures were ...

On the evening of Jan. 27, engineers from Morton Thiokol, including Boisjoly, gave an emergency presentation to NASA revealing concerns about the effect cold weather had on the rocket joints and ...

Roger Boisjoly was a senior engineer at Morton-Thiokol, the manufacturing company that built the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle. Bob Ebeling was his manager. Photo: boxster / Canva Pro ...

Roger Boisjoly, a NASA contractor at rocket-builder Morton Thiokol Inc, warned in 1985 that seals on the booster rocket joints could fail in freezing temperatures.

In 1965, Thiokol, an American rocket and missile propulsion systems company, began developing a motor for the Genie with a "longer lifespan and wider firing temperature limits," per Boeing.

For example, independent producers Morton and Thiokol were absorbed into a company called Orbital ATK, and then the rocket-motor business of Orbital was acquired by missile maker Northrop Grumman ...

Promontory is about 75 miles northwest of Salt Lake City and is the same location where Morton Thiokol tested the solid rocket boosters that powered the Space Shuttle fleet from 1981 to 2011.

Thiokol Chemical Corporation, which had originally located at Woodbine to manufacture solid propellant rocket boosters for the space race, had pivoted to manufacturing Army munitions.

It was an unusually cold morning for Cape Canaveral, Fla.—too cold, warned the engineers of NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, builder of the shuttle’s solid rocket motors.