Word: high
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Crunchy Snow. After this climactic event Astronomer Kuiper thinks the moon led an increasingly peaceful life. It picked up the rest of the small satellites, which made the fresh-looking pits on its surface. Cosmic rays and other high-speed particles bombarded its surface, riddling the material with microscopic holes. This beaten-up stuff is only an inch or so thick, says Kuiper, and it is not dust. He thinks it would feel underfoot "like crunchy snow...
There is no water on the moon, so Gold's erosion cannot be like the kind that wears down earth's mountains. He thinks that the chief eroding agent is high-energy radiation from the sun helped by cosmic rays and meteorites. They slowly chewed a flour-fine dust from the moon's exposed rocks and kept it stirred up so that it gradually flowed into low places like the interiors of old craters and the maria...
Probably it has no life at all. Dr. Kuiper thinks that it has no water or free oxygen. Radio waves, which penetrate the murky atmosphere, hint that the temperature of the invisible surface is something like 500° F., which is much too high for the earth's kinds of life. Venus rotates only once in several weeks, making the sunlit side much hotter than the dark side, and causing violent storms that sweep perpetually over its hot, dry deserts...
...gather much valuable information without landing on the moon or a planet. A picture of the back of the moon is one of the easiest prizes. Interplanetary space is by no means empty. It contains a very thin gas of unknown composition, and through it a "wind" of high-speed particles blows outward from the sun. This wind may be dangerous; it should be studied carefully before manned ships are launched deeply into space...
...broadcast it. On the air, it hardly seemed worth all the fuss. Despite a few diverting sight gags-e.g., Benny, in full Victorian rig, standing impassive as ceiling plaster rains down on him-the long-delayed take-off shed more gas than light. One of the rare high spots: when Benny urges his wife (Barbara Stanwyck) to take dinner in bed, she screams hysterically: "I had breakfast in bed, I had lunch in bed. I can't have dinner in bed-it's full of dirty dishes...