Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pinpoint. Discoverer II, cruising on its elliptical pole-to-pole course at 17,000 m.p.h. (ranging from 220 miles to 152 miles from the earth), was to have launched its capsule over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii on its 17th orbit. A retrorocket would slow it down to force its entry into the scorching atmosphere. Then an orange parachute (lined with aluminum for radar reflection) would pop at a preset speed, drop it gently toward the water. Eight Air Force C-119 flying boxcars, trailing 15-ft. by 30-ft. nylon harnesses, were to try snagging the package before...
When Brazil's famed Architect Oscar Niemeyer designed the chapel 16 years ago for Belo Horizonte (pop. 650,000), he was inspired by French Poet Paul Claudel's statement: "A church is God's hangar on earth." But to Belo Horizonte's Roman Catholic archbishop, Niemeyer's hangar looked more like the devil's bomb shelter -a parabolic vault of glass and stucco, with an emaciated Christ glaring from a huge fresco by Painter Candido Portinari. Worse, Architect Niemeyer and Painter Portinari were godless Communists. Despite protests by Belo Horizonte's Mayor Juscelino...
...World Congress of Flight, which the Air Force assembled last week among the slot machines of Las Vegas, Nev., Dr. Edward Teller described a scheme to explode a nuclear charge 100 million miles away from the earth. The purpose would be to test a key assumption of Einstein's theory of relativity: that every kind of electromagnetic radiation (light, infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, X rays and gamma rays) travels at the same speed-186,000 miles a second...
...nuclear charge is exploded 100 million miles from the earth, it will release all kinds of radiation at the same instant. According to relativity theory, the waves should still be traveling together when they reach the earth nine minutes later. But if gamma rays, for instance, prove to travel measurably faster than infrared through the vacuum of space, relativity, the supreme law of the universe, will have to be revised...
This spectacular experiment is not scheduled, only talked about. But it should not be too difficult to perform. A powerful nuclear charge need only be blasted free of the earth and set in orbit around the sun. Since its speed will not be the same as the earth's, it will move steadily away. When it gets far enough, it can be exploded by a radio signal or a timing mechanism...