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Challenger Tragedy - In Depth, and Deeply Felt
Patchw0rk F0g writes "On this, the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, Jay Barbree has a moving and in-depth piece on this international disaster." From the article: "During several earlier shuttle missions, disaster did everything it could to crawl into the shuttle launch system and turn it into tumbling flaming wreckage. The primary O-rings on those flights suffered severe erosion from superheated gases, sometimes accompanied by lesser erosion. And the erosion had occurred after launch temperatures much higher than on this freezing Florida day -- 53 degrees was the lowest launch-time temperature up to that time. The booster engineers felt helpless. For months, they had been studying the O-ring seal problem. They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'"
you might want to expand your horizons a bit. the toronto blue jays won the world series in recent memory, and they are not in the usa.
in latin america, also not the usa, baseball is played quite a bit as well.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Let's not forget that the US didn't even make the semis in the baseball at the Athens Olympics. The four top teams there were Cuba, Australia, Japan and Canada.
Cogito, ergo sig.