The Nation - News from March 22, 1988

A sub-scale shuttle booster featuring deliberate flaws in critical O-ring joints was successfully fired in the third such test to verify the new joints can stand up to major failures. The 52-foot two-segment rocket was fired for less than a second at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the booster program is managed. It was the third such test in a row, but the first featuring fully operational O-ring joints like the ones that will be used by the shuttle Discovery when it blasts off in August in the first post-Challenger flight. “In general, it looked good,” said Marshall spokesman Jim Sahli. He said the three rockets will be dismantled and analyzed next week.