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Science, which follows the fiery trail of last week's cover story on space satellites with a penetrating look at the rocket re-entry problem, illustrated by five pages of color photographs, including the first shot of an ICBM nose cone streaking through the dense lower atmosphere...
...technology. But the most formidable problem of all was one that should have been familiar to anyone who ever saw a meteor turn into a trail of fire in the night sky. It was the problem of "re-entry": how to get an ICBM warhead, with its protective nose cone, back through the earth's atmosphere without its being burned into sky-streaking embers. As history may one day note, it was at an Ithaca, N.Y. cocktail party that one of the most significant early steps toward success was taken...
What Kantrowitz, who perhaps more than anyone else rates the title of "Mr. Nose Cone," had to offer was experience and expertness in a testing device known as the shock tube. The problems of nose-cone re-entry were fearsome enough on paper. It was understood all too well that an ICBM re-entry body of cone and warhead would have to crash back into the earth's atmosphere at near-meteor speed of 15,000 m.p.h., with enough motion of energy to vaporize five times its weight of iron. Piling up ahead of the re-entry body would...
...diameter, from which the air can be pumped. At one end, a section is walled off by a copper diaphragm: that section is filled with an explosive mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. At the other end is a vacuum tank, and just ahead of it is a tiny nose-cone test model. When an electric spark explodes the oxygen-hydrogen, it bursts through the diaphragm and into the vacuum. Ahead of it rushes a hot shock wave that hits the test model at actual re-entry speed and temperature. The flow lasts no more than one-thousandth of a second...
...bird screamed upward off its Cape Canaveral launching pad, nosed over toward the southeast, curved down the length of the Atlantic and navigated 9,000 miles before its nose cone splashed hard by its chosen target just south of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. In exactly 52½ minutes last week, the 130-ton, 75-ft. Atlas rocket set a new U.S. missile record and beat the Russians' best distance mark by more than 1,000 miles...