Word: caped
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bright, waxing moon rode through the racing cumulus clouds above Florida's Cape Canaveral. At the floodlit launching pad, a gangling service structure, standing like a jeweled skyscraper, nestled against the U.S. Army's Jupiter-C rocket. A homely creature it was, its streamlined shell topped with a bucketlike piece and a long, thin, cylindrical nose. This was the Explorer, the Promethean gift that the U.S. aimed to fling against the invisible doors of space...
Only the week before, the Navy had babied its slender satellite-laden Vanguard. Day after day the tension on the Cape had tightened as the Vanguard countdown crept steadily toward zero: once within nine minutes of launching, once again within 4½ minutes, again to 22 seconds-even to a hairbreadth 14 seconds. Each time the launching was scrubbed. And at length, the red-eyed, nerve-racked Navymen found a small propellant leak in the rocket's second stage. It was during the Vanguard trials that the Army moved its shrouded bird from a hangar to its launching...
...Pentagon at that moment, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker and the Jupiter's top Scientist Wernher von Braun joined a score of other military and civilian officials in the Army's telecommunications room, seated themselves at a table before two huge screens, one enlarging teletype messages from the Cape, the other carrying Pentagon messages back to the site. Elaborately, Von Braun lectured the attending brass on the rocket, described the painstaking timing and complex processes that must bring the big bird to life for its skyward trip. Then everybody settled down to wait. In his cottage at Augusta...
...Cape, the cheers had long since faded. But the unself-conscious awe that swept over the missilemen and other observers hung on from the first moment of the rocket's majestic birth and the first wild dance of flame that fired it. Said one man: "There was something about the way it went up. No nonsense. It seemed to know what...
...possibility of firing a satellite into outer space was Dr. Wernher von Braun, father of the German V-2 turned U.S. Army missile expert. Von Braun assured the group that the Redstone missile, already developed at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. and successfully fired at Cape Canaveral in 1953, could be souped up to put a 5-lb. satellite into outer-space orbit...