‘Quiet as a Crypt’: The Shuttle Launch Pad Aborts (Part 1)by Ben Evans March 29, 2014
Close-up view of Discovery’s three main engines—still exhibiting evidence of scorching from their momentary ignition on 26 June 1984—in the wake of the shuttle program’s first RSLS abort. Photo Credit: NASASTS-51FFor Story Musgrave, the flight engineer on Challenger’s Mission 51F, his ascent to orbit on 29 July 1985, was arguably dramatic, when the shuttle suffered a hair-raising main engine shutdown 108 km above Earth … after already enduring its own RSLS abort on the pad, three weeks earlier. “The ground made the call ‘Limits to Inhibit’,” he recalled to a Smithsonian interviewer, years later, “which is, for us, an extremely serious omen, [because it] means the ground is seeing problems that are going to shut you down. I’m looking through the procedures book and thinking we’re going to land at our transoceanic abort site in Spain. I’m rehearsing all the steps and my hands are moving through the book and I’m thinking ‘We’re going to Spain. Things are bad!’” (...)
https://www.americaspace.com/2014/03/29/quiet-as-a-crypt-the-shuttle-launch-pad-aborts-part-1/