Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...proposed a beefed-up version with a booster rocket that will push it up to orbiting speed (18,000 m.p.h.). It will climb into genuine space, well above 150 miles. There will be no human pilot on the first flights. Automatic instruments will ride the winged satellite around the earth for awhile. Then, perhaps on electronic command from below, they will glide it to earth. Later, as the art develops, the first human pilot may take the same ride...
...planets other than the earth sustain thinking creatures? Philosophers, theologians, scientists, fiction writers and ordinary people have speculated on the question for centuries. Now a widely honored scientist, having pondered long on the subject, makes his answer: yes. Says Russian-born Otto Struve, 60, head of the astronomy department of the University of California at Berkeley: The Milky Way galaxy, the great swarm of stars to which the sun belongs, almost certainly contains millions of planets inhabited by intelligent life...
...Bridge. Struve is asked why the inhabitants of distant planets, some of whom must be higher in the evolutionary scale than humans are, have never visited the earth or communicated with it. He replies that there may be a limit to the degree of intelligence that life can attain. This limit may make it impossible for the wisest inhabitants of the galaxy to bridge the enormous distances between planetary systems...
...years, throughout the galaxy, a supernova (exploding star) blows up with a mighty detonation. Astronomers generally credit these events to natural causes. But, says Struve, "it is perfectly conceivable that some intelligent race meddled once too often with nuclear laws and blew themselves to bits." When astronomers on the earth are able to observe such explosions with sufficient accuracy, they'may be able to determine which ones were natural and which were caused by beings that grew too intelligent for their own good...
...section of the Tularosa Basin, near Holloman, that is almost as flat as a frozen lake. While figuring theoretically how to lay out the 35,080-ft. track, they considered making it perfectly straight both up-and-down and sideways, but gave this up because the curvature of the earth (the earth considered as a sphere with a 4,000-mile radius) would require either a cut in the ground 35 ft. deep at the midsection of the track, or 35-ft. embankments at the ends. So the engineers compromised with nature by making their track a series of sections...