Word: burnout
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...left alone it burns at an uneven rate: as the fuel is consumed, the cavity gets bigger and exposes more surface to the heat. Since the amount of hot gas generated is proportional to the area of burning fuel, the gas pressure keeps rising until just before burnout. The effect is that solid-fuel rockets of this type must have superstrong casings to hold the peak pressure, and must thus pay a penalty in weight...
...ICBM Atlas had been fired, not in a trajectory whose end was a watery South Atlantic target but into the skies. Its tape recording of President Eisenhower's greetings heralded the beginning of worldwide communications through outer space. Earlier U.S. satellites were fired in stages, dropped sections after burnout, and finally flung small instrumented payloads into orbit around the earth. But somehow there was greater impact in the fact that the body of the Atlas went up in one piece, was circling the globe as the U.S.'s biggest satellite, its weight easily comparable to the heaviest...
...days earlier, was launched from a B-47 at a target 700 miles away. The Bold Orion is 25 ft. long, 6 ft. in diameter. Upon launching, a long lanyard from the plane to the rocket jerks free, firing the first stage directly ahead. After first-stage burnout and separation the second stage fires, guided by a new type of system devised by Martin Co.. then arcs upward at a 45° angle. Before reaching the top of its arc, it releases the nose-cone, which follows a ballistic curve to the target over the horizon...
...with good news. Cued by the Hawthorne Data Reduction Center, the big radiotelescope station in Manchester, England picked up Pioneer within a dozen minutes, sent tracking information clacking back into the electronic data-reducing headquarters in the Space Technology Lab. But moments later, at the third stage rocket burnout, with Pioneer at maximum velocity, Canaveral scientists quickly computed speed and altitude. Had Pioneer shot up at too vertical an angle and thus been robbed of some of its getaway speed? The computations said yes. The scientists instantly decided to fire all eight vernier rockets in the fourth stage (although these...
...every 4½ seconds for only 54 seconds up to a maximum of 12 g. Fortunately, from Dr. Stapp's work and other tests, researchers at Wright A.F.B. have found that a man quickly recovers his ability to withstand a new g onslaught: after first-stage burnout of a three-stage rocket, he coasts for several seconds at high but steady speed; when the second stage blasts off, he can take it, and his body is also ready for the acceleration of the final blast. On reentry, the g forces loosed by deceleration are likely to be far more...