Word: cocoon
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Clear Space. The enormous cocoon of safety with which the U.S. has wrapped the Air Age is as complex as the problems of flight itself. Hunched over green-glowing radarscopes in 35 stations across the nation stand ARTC (Air Route Traffic Control) men, who follow and guide airplanes flying through heavy weather or at sky-streaking altitudes on Instrument Flight Rules. Moving their transparent markers ("shrimp boats") alongside little blips, they warn of nearby traffic, give directions, order changes in headings and altitudes. If a plane is a 550-m.p.h. jet, the controller gives the pilot 100 miles' clear...
...cockpits are more of the wrappings of the cocoon: rigorously trained pilots with computers for brains and steel for nerves, whose proficiency is checked by the clock and whose mistakes-even minor ones-are costly. The planes they fly are machines of infinite precision, built and maintained and double-checked constantly to assure mastery of the laws of physics...
Vote of Confidence. Just three weeks ago, Prime Minister Nehru stunningly and surprisingly emerged from the cocoon of indecision. With brusque firmness, he sent a note to Peking rejecting Premier Chou En-lai's proposal that both the Indian and Chinese border forces withdraw 12½ miles from their present positions. Nehru's counterproposals were for a "no man's land" in the disputed areas, which would result in getting almost all Chinese troops out of Indian territory. Nehru added sharply that "the cause of the recent troubles is action taken from your side of the border...
...Little Joe rocket (a cluster of eight solid-fuel rockets) took off with a full-scale astronaut capsule perched on nose. No man was inside it, only a rhesus monkey named Sam and a collection of meal worms, bacteria, molds and other biological samples. Strapped to a kind of cocoon lined with plastic foam sat Sam the monkey, riding in astronaut's "chair." Sam and cocoon were enclosed in an inner, air-conditioned " logical package," thick with straps, wi and instruments to test Sam's reactions...
...tiny part of the life span of a galaxy. Since the nucleus is not drained, its hydrogen must be replenished somehow. Rougoor and Oort suggest that the replenishing hydrogen may come from the corona of thinly scattered hydrogen atoms that surrounds the whole galaxy like a huge spherical cocoon 80,000 light-years wide, working its way into the spinning disk at the top and bottom...