Word: birde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...York for processing, and the following day the pictures were in Chicago being engraved and printed. This week, less than seven days after the event, they appear in TIME, the first color photographs of the Atlas in flight. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Death of the Big Bird...
...murky night last week to give the Atlas its final preening before flight. In a blockhouse a few hundred feet from the launching pad, physicists and engineers started radioing to foremen the long lists that comprised the exquisitely detailed ritual of inspection. Fitted together in the great steel bird's innards were some 300,000 parts, and a failure in one of them could cause a misfire...
...nearly 3 p.m. when the hollow-eyed, unshaven missilemen finally had the Atlas, biggest bird in the U.S.'s missile aviary, ready for launching. Men inside the blockhouse listened in tight-lipped silence to the final countdown. At zero, a finger pressed a red button in a control panel, and the missile, rising slowly and majestically, started on history's second Atlas flight (see color pages opposite...
...started off promisingly. In its straight-up flight, lasting 20 seconds or so, it seemed to be, in the missilemen's term, "programing" perfectly, i.e., doing what its makers and tenders expected. But as it arched into its southeastward course, the tail fire glowed too dark, and the bird faltered. The turbine pumps were failing to feed the right mixture of fuel, and because among those 300,000 delicately tooled parts there could be no human hand to make the needed adjustment, Atlas II was doomed...
...next day he tries to sell the saddle cinches his wife has woven; the patron will not buy. He tries to sell his turkey; the patron throws the bird out the door. Desperate, man and wife sit down by the roadside, and he tells her he must go away. Somewhere there must be work to do-or things to steal. In silence she suckles the child. His face softens. The spring of life is flowing still...