Word: cones
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cape Canaveral fired a Thor missile with a second-stage Able-Star rocket. Inside a cone atop the Able-Star snuggled the Navy's 223-lb. Transit II-A navigation satellite, a sphere 36 in. in diameter. Transit was the rocket's principal passenger. But with it went a satellite hitchhiker: a 42-lb., 20-in. globe stuffed with instruments to measure solar radiation...
Flaming Arc. Thus, even while the heat-sink cones were still being tested, both G.E. and Avco started work on a new kind of cone. It was deliberately designed so that some of its material would be "ablated"-vaporized and blown away into nothingness by the intensely hot air through which it raced. Ablating cones promised a weight advantage, but not even the shock tube was adequate to test them at the research level. Therefore a new testing device, the arc wind tunnel, was tailored...
...rushes in. On its way, it passes through a flaming arc using kilowatts enough to light a city. The air's temperature soars to 14,000° F., and it whams into samples of ablating material that behave as if they were part of a real nose cone...
...ablating nose cone is the design of the present. It is longer and more pointed than its heat-sink predecessor. It can slice more deeply through the atmosphere before it slows down, giving it greater protection against defensive missiles fired from the ground. Better still, it is comparatively light: the G.E. ablating nose cone used on the "longfellow'' Atlas fired May 20 from Florida to the Indian Ocean probably played an important part in the missile's being light enough to attain its 9,000-mile range...
Also in the visible future is the manned spacecraft that, with techniques based on military nose-cone research, will bring its human travelers safely down from orbit or from an interplanetary journey. Strangely, the manned spacecraft in some ways presents fewer problems than the ICBM. Where an ICBM enters the atmosphere at about a 20° angle with a sudden, explosive shock, a space vehicle can come into the atmosphere flat, keeping its deceleration and temperature comparatively...