Word: caped
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...countdown was perfect. Up from the launch pad of Cape Canaveral at 10:23 one morning last week roared a 90-ft., 52½-ton Thor-Able rocket, lifting cleanly into an overcast sky with steadily increasing acceleration. Two minutes and 40 seconds later the second stage fired smoothly, then the third. Out from the sides of the globular pay load unfolded four strange paddles. As the "paddlewheel satellite" tumbled through space at 171 revolutions per minute, 8,000 solar cells in the 20-inch-square vanes picked up the sun's energy to charge the chemical batteries, send...
...Explorer VI, shot into orbit from Cape Canaveral last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), was the most sophisticated satellite the U.S. has launched. Rigid arms like paddle wheels, whirling through the sunlight of empty space, were its most spectacular feature, designed to test the possibility of capturing enough energy from the sun to send messages across millions of miles (TIME, April 27). Such a durable source of energy is crucial to proposed space probes to Venus or farther planets, for there is little point in sending out space probes unless their transmitters can send information back to earth...
...Explorer VI had more to do than absorb energy from the sun. Purposely programed for the most eccentric orbit ever achieved by an earth satellite, it settled almost exactly into its planned path, first reached its record apogee some 26,400 miles straight out into space from the Cape of Good Hope, its perigee a narrow 157 miles over Singapore. With so great a range of altitude, it will pierce both of the newly discovered Van Allen radiation belts (TIME. May 12, 1958 et seq.), collect comprehensive data on phenomena ranging from the earth's ionosphere to cosmic dust...
...about to fire a series of atom bombs. To his delight, the oscilloscope showed telltale wiggles. Two months later, he picked up the trail of the Russian rocket that launched Sputnik I. Enlisting the aid of other colleagues, he turned his attention to missile launchings at Cape Canaveral. There he ran into bureaucracy. None of the armed forces would give him notice of projected firings; Tepee's men finally had to set up their own system of volunteer watchers on Cape Canaveral to warn them when a firing seemed imminent. Meanwhile, the FCC caviled about the frequencies he wanted...
...Athel" Spilhaus, as his Minneapolis friends call him, was born in South Africa, the grandson of the Scottish founder of the country's educational system and son of Premier Jan Smuts's Portuguese-German trade commissioner. Ever since he left Cape Town to drive with his bride to Cairo, Spilhaus has been doing and saying things that astonish his less impulsive colleagues...