The orbiter was engulfed in a swelling cloud of combustible propellant, and the nozzles of its three main engines swiveled wildly as the onboard computers struggled to regain control of the disintegrating spacecraft; for the few fractions of a second it took for the engines to consume the fuel remaining in the feed lines, their high-pressure turbopumps continued to spin, until the computers shut them down one at a time. Then the booster rockets tore free from their mounts, and Challenger, still hurtling toward space at almost 1,500 miles per hour, tumbled from its precisely prescribed
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