Word: chambered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Elegantly suited and vested, Premier-Designate Evariste Kimba sat on the front bench of the crowded Chamber of Deputies and tried to look confident. Three rows back, his predecessor, Moise Tshombe, tapped his foot nervously. As the Congolese Parliament met in joint session last week, about the only empty seat in the Palais de la Nation was the leopard-skin presidential chair itself: President Joseph Kasavubu, who could not vote anyway, had gone off to attend a memorial service for the nation's civil war dead...
...flame, burning conventional fuels, tends to blow out at supersonic flight speeds (above 720 m.p.h. at low altitudes). If it is to keep burning and providing thrust, the ramjet needs an inlet shape to generate its own shock wave, which will slow passage of air through the combustion chamber to a subsonic flow. Above 4,000 m.p.h., however such an inlet design could cause excessive temperatures and pressures in the combustion chamber, and thrust wouk be drastically reduced...
...Agena's problems began 368 seconds after launch. At that moment, precisely on schedule, fuming nitric acid fuel began spraying into the rocket's thrust chamber, followed a few milliseconds later by the oxidizer, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine. Somehow, too much fuel entered the chamber ahead of the oxidizer. The result was a "hard start" of the Agena's engine, similar to the backfire that occurs when gasoline and air ignite prematurely in an automobile engine...
...courage, the decision pleased German businessmen. They have been grumbling that the government's grandiose spending has nourished inflation and-worse yet-used up so much bank capital that private companies are hard put to find investment funds. Complains Ernst Schneider, president of the West German Chamber of Commerce: "The public sector is making demands on capital to such an extent that interest rates have reached a level worthy of an underdeveloped country." The Bundesbank has hiked Germany's discount rate twice this year, to 4% at present, and business loans commonly cost 7% to 8%. Still, German...
...catastrophe. Test flights, however, would have been both costly and timeconsuming, and the Agena's previous record of reliability made them seem unduly wasteful. An identical twin of the lost rocket had been extensively checked on the ground, fired in a test stand, put in a vacuum chamber to simulate operating altitudes, started and restarted until all the glitches seemed gone. The fact is, says one of the country's top rocket-motor experts, that "sometimes these birds just flop-even though the chances are something like 9 in 10 that it won't happen...