Word: aloftness
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Though classic battlefields may be few in an all-out war of the future, the N-bomb may prove to have other valuable military uses. Carried aloft by anti-missile missiles, it could do its job without spraying the ground below with radioactive fallout. But perhaps the most devastating effect of the N-bomb would be to make nuclear explosives available to all nations. Plutonium and uranium 235 for fission bombs are expensive and scarce, but fusion ingredients (lithium, deuterium, etc.) are comparatively cheap and plentiful. If they are the only major ingredients needed, the manufacture of N-bombs...
...like the gobs of a three-scoop ice cream cone were a polished aluminum sphere, the Naval Research Laboratory's Greb III solar radiation satellite, and a smaller drum named Injun, built at Dr. James Van Allen's laboratory at the State University of Iowa. Boosted aloft by a Thor-Able-Star rocket, all three satellites soared into space together. Though the launch was successful, the strong springs, meant to shove the satellites apart to follow separate orbits around the earth, did an incomplete job. Transit went its lonely way, but Greb and Injun stuck together...
Seaborg assured his audience that a great deal of ground testing will be done before a fiercely radioactive nuclear rocket is fired aloft. "We must plan." he said, "to handle the maximum credible accidents that might arise in the launching of a nuclear rocket, its malfunction or abort, its re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, and the ultimate disposition of the nuclear engines and power units in space. I am cautiously optimistic that solutions are at hand...
...toward space. In the returning silence, the amplified thump of an electronic timer beat like a pulse across the sands of Florida's Cape Canaveral. The pulse of the nation beat with it. For this was no routine rocket shoot. Riding that long, white missile as it soared aloft last week was Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr., first U.S. astronaut ever fired into space. And riding with him was his country's pride, the prestige of his country's science, the promise of his country's future on the expanding frontiers of the universe...
...missile arced into high, cool air, millions of awed Americans followed its flight. On television sets from Canaveral to California they watched while its widening vapor trail was twisted into antic patterns by winds aloft. They listened while the calm, businesslike voice of the astronaut reported by radio as he progressed along his predetermined path. Schoolrooms knew an unaccustomed hush as students concentrated on Shepard's dangerous trip. Traffic thinned in thousands of cities as drivers pulled to the curb and tuned their radios. In Indianapolis, a judge halted courtroom proceedings so that all hands could watch...