On Saturday, the New York Times quoted another anonymous source, who described the drop in pressure inside the right-hand booster a minute into flight, and said that NASA now believed the accident had been caused by a flame leaking from the rocket and burning a hole in the shuttle’s external fuel tank. Even so, the agency wasn’t ready to say anything publicly—perhaps, the paper suggested, because it feared who would be blamed for what happened. Asked that day if there had ever been a leak between the segments of a solid rocket booster, Jesse Moore said that no such fault had ever appeared in
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