Word: balloonfuls
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...report that the Department of Defense is afraid that the Russians may beat the U.S. in the satellite race. According to this theory, the Russians are probably working on a satellite just big enough to be tracked. It may carry a small radio transmitter, or it may inflate a balloon of aluminized plastic film. Expanded in space by a whiff of gas, it might reach a size that would be brilliantly visible at dusk or dawn. This bright Communist star, rising in the west every 90 minutes and streaking rapidly eastward, would win enormous prestige for its Soviet launchers...
...first vehicle to make a really big stride into space will probably be a cheap, unstreamlined, unglamorous, four-stage job assembled out of familiar rocket hardware by Aeronutronic Systems, Inc., a Ford Motor Co. subsidiary at Glendale, Calif. Its gimmick: it will start at 100,000 ft. from a balloon...
...Aeronutronic rocketeers concluded that if the vehicle could be lifted above the densest part of the stratosphere before it was fired, they could get the advantages of high-speed starting without the disadvantages of drag and heat. They got in touch with General Mills, Inc., which had developed enormous balloons of polyethylene film, asked if the company could design a balloon that could serve as a launching platform. General Mills could...
...Miles Up. Hanging nose-up below its balloon, Far Side will be lifted nearly 19 miles above the earth, where the air has one-hundredth the density of sea-level air. A radio signal from the ground will set an igniting system in motion. The four Stage One Recruits will roar into life, concentrating their 160,000 lbs. of thrust on the small rocket and snapping it upward with 70 g. of acceleration. It will shoot through the filmy balloon as if it were not there. The first stage fuel will be burned in 1.5 sec., giving Far Side...
Standing toe to toe against the looming Soviet-satellite army of 175 divisions keeps the five-division U.S. Seventh Army in Germany on constant alert against the day the "balloon goes up" in Western Europe. Merely staying combat-ready in peacetime is tough enough, but the hard-training Seventh is plagued by an even tougher problem: one in three of its 165,000 tankers, atomic cannoneers and plain gravel crunchers should never have been sent overseas in the first place. Reason: they are "eight balls," mentally equivalent to sixth-grade schoolboys, a disciplinary headache to their commanders and a serious...