Within twenty-four hours, the film from the 70-millimeter high-speed movie cameras—equipped with telescopic lenses, shooting forty frames a second, from angles not shown on TV—that had tracked the launch from Cape Canaveral had been processed and copies flown up to Houston from Florida. Spooling the footage across a light box, one frame at a time, the astronauts analyzing the images in the Space Center lab could see a tongue of bright flame flaring from the aft joint in the right-hand solid rocket booster about sixty seconds after launch. As soon as they saw it, they knew exactly what had
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