Word: braun
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...rumor that one of these plans may be adopted for immediate action sends practical rocket men into a cold sweat. Neither Von Braun nor his critics can debate freely in public. Von Braun works for Army Ordnance at its guided missile center at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala. His job is military missiles, not space ships, but nearly all the facts that bear on space flight also apply to missiles and are, therefore, strictly secret. His opponents are muzzled by the same difficulty...
Cautious Viking. Most articulate critic of the Von Braun plan is Dr. Milton Rosen of the Naval Research Laboratory at Washington, a careful, meticulous man. As head of the Navy's Viking Project, Dr. Rosen can talk comparatively freely, because the Viking is a high-altitude research rocket, not a fighting missile...
...Rosen is frankly aghast at difficulties that Von Braun lightly brushes aside. Every ambitious rocket, he says, contains a long series of intricate components; all of them must work perfectly or the whole rocket will fail. Each new element-down to valves and gaskets-must be tested over & over until its reliability is close to absolute...
This makes rocket progress necessarily slow. Rosen believes that Von Braun's 7,000-ton shuttle rockets - to say nothing of his space station-would be a reckless leap into the blind future, like trying to build a B-36 out of the engines and wing sections used in World War I. The inevitable outcome, he thinks, would be a gigantic fiasco...
Rosen admits that chemical fuels, burned in a multi-stage rocket, can theoretically place a payload in a permanent orbit. But he points out that the Von Braun plan would expend more than 6,000 tons of fuel for each 36-ton payload. Even if the shuttle rockets survived more than one trip (Rosen thinks it unlikely), the carrying charge on each ton of payload would be fantastic...