Word: blastoff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...doubt that they would ever get off the pad with just 15 minutes' warning. In contrast, the Minuteman burns a solid, rubberlike fuel developed by Thiokol Chemical Corp. Once the Minuteman is fueled, it needs little maintenance, can be stored indefinitely and can be fired, from command to blastoff, in just 30 seconds...
Until the last two minutes before blastoff, the cherry picker had been close to the pad, prepared to snatch Shepard from Freedom 7 in case of a disaster on the ground. Besides the cherry picker, a fire-proofed Army personnel carrier stood by with a fire-suited crew. Some four miles from Pad 5, the headquarters of the Cape's Abort Rescue Team was a humming hive of activity. Six helicopters were tuning up, ready to carry skilled technicians, doctors and frogmen to rescue the astronaut if the capsule splashed near by. If the Freedom 7 should start...
...Downrange in the South Atlantic, the recovery ship Timber Hitch stood by as Cape Canaveral launched an Atlas 700 miles into space. Seventy-six minutes and 5,000 miles after the blastoff, Timber Hitch plucked from the water a cylindrical instrument package ejected by the Atlas nose cone. Later, it was packed off to the States in a trombone case (it just happens to fit snugly within the shaped confines of a sliphorn...
...seven U.S. Project Mercury astronauts watched from a Cape Canaveral bunker, an Atlas roared off into the rain-soaked skies carrying the first spaceborne production model of the Mercury capsule. But 65 seconds after the blastoff, the Atlas exploded and disintegrated. From the capsule itself came radio signals for 3½ minutes after the launching, indicating that only the Atlas booster had been destroyed, that the capsule had hit the sea intact. A day later recovery teams retrieved sections of the capsule from the ocean...