Word: aec
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Personal Project. Thaler, then 31, did not wait for official encouragement, or even ask for it. Instead, he went ahead on his own. He borrowed radio equipment from a colleague, set it up and trained it in the direction of Nevada, where the AEC was about to fire a series of atom bombs. To his delight, the oscilloscope showed telltale wiggles. Two months later, he picked up the trail of the Russian rocket that launched Sputnik I. Enlisting the aid of other colleagues, he turned his attention to missile launchings at Cape Canaveral. There he ran into bureaucracy. None...
Vindication of Dixon-Yates came just four weeks too late to help Lewis L. Strauss in his unsuccessful battle to win Senate confirmation as Secretary of Commerce. During the prolonged Strauss hearings (TIME, June 15 et seq.), Democrats made much of his role as AEC chairman in working out the Dixon-Yates contract, used it against him in the fight that led to the first turndown (49-46) of a presidential Cabinet nomination since the days of Teapot Dome...
...Jackass Flat, Nev., the AEC carried out, and later announced in deadpan fashion, the first full-power ground test of the Kiwi-A nuclear rocket engine-an event most newspapers ignored. Developed at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory by a team headed by Dr. Raemer E. Schreiber, the engine worked perfectly. All details (thrust, temperature, etc.) were secret, but Senator Clinton P. Anderson is officially entitled to hear them as chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Wired Anderson to Dr. Norris E. Bradbury, director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory: CONGRATULATIONS. THIS...
Kiwi's mission was not to fly. As the keystone of AEC's Project Rover, it was supposed to determine the feasibility of nuclear rockets. Though AEC has never defined just what it considers "feasible," Dr. Schreiber has hinted that a satisfactory nuclear rocket must be a single-stage vehicle with enough thrust to escape from the earth with 15% of its take-off weight as payload. Now Kiwi-A has apparently demonstrated that this kind of power is feasible...
...awesome. One objective was to measure the capacity of the highenergy, high-altitude explosions to cause "eclipse blindness"-lesions of the retina, so called because they have most often happened to people who watch eclipses of the sun without protecting their eyes. Rabbits were chosen as the test animals. AEC scientists found that an explosion the size and height of Teak delivers its thermal energy in less time than a rabbit (or a man) can blink. Said the report grimly: "Retinal burns were produced in the rabbits at distances up to 300 nautical miles." This tended to support earlier Army...