Word: blunting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rose this week in Washington before a distinguished audience of hypersonic-flight experts to deliver the prestigious Wright Brothers Lecture. For Speaker H. Julian Allen of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the honor was well timed. That morning Avco Manufacturing Corp. announced that it had devised a blunt-nose cone for the Air Force ICBM Titan. Originator of the blunt-nose concept: Dr. "Harvey" Allen, one of the most brilliant and colorful of the nation's flight scientists...
...Wright Brothers Lecture was the latest honor for jovial Bachelor Allen, 47, a dedicated NACA scientist for 21 years. When Allen suggested in 1952 that the heating problem caused by the re-entry of a ballistic missile into the earth's atmosphere might be solved by a blunt-nose cone, highly resistant to the air, many of his colleagues were skeptical. The prevailing theory backed a needle-shaped cone that would offer minimum aerodynamic drag. Allen's blunt shape built up temperatures in the tens of thousands of degrees, but it saved the cone from melting away...
Long before his blunt-nose idea, Allen had become famous among flight scientists. A Stanford graduate (class of '32), he joined NACA in 1936, became known as a hustling young man with solid, but unconventional, ideas. Too busy to remember names, he took to calling everyone "Harvey," soon had the nickname tagged back on him. No great shakes as an office manager, he watched his desk disappear under piles of paper, often had to whistle in the janitors to dredge his work out of the wastepaper. But somehow Allen got his job done, e.g., the laminar-flow air foil...
Pasternak is a poet, and it is not merely such blunt statements of opposition that make his novel stick in the Communist crop. The book attempts a subtle defense of individualism, and of the individual's search for meaning in life. While nursing wounded in a service hospital, the heroine muses: "One needs to believe in essential values, in life's force, in beauty, in truth so that they-and not human authority-may lead you up sure paths...
...glide missile, Eggers says, should be shaped rather like a child's paper dart (see cut). The slim conical body should have a blunt point, which does not get as hot at hypervelocity as a sharp point does. The leading edges of the wings and fins should be blunt too. This shape should radiate away enough frictional heat to keep the temperature of its skin below the softening point...