Word: blastoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Since the moon's escape velocity is lower than the earth's, a lunar-based missile would spend less fuel in blastoff, could use it to increase speed of travel. Even with today's rocket engines, says the Air Force's Singer, a moon-based team could send a missile from moon to earth in considerably less than two days. "The improvements in space and missile technology that will be required actually to put a man on the moon will perforce include the means for reducing moon-to-earth transit times to the order of hours...
...Without the characteristic roar of blastoff, a Navy Polaris popped out of a large tube, impelled by compressed air in a device the Navy has installed at Canaveral to simulate the pitch and roll of a ship. Dubbed "the world's largest cocktail shaker," the $3,000,000 ship-motion simulator was held steady for this test, which concentrated on the compressed-air takeoff. It worked perfectly. The Polaris jumped silently to a point 60 ft. overhead where its first-stage engine came to life, and the missile left a long white trail behind as it took...