Word: hydrogenate
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...improve its design. Ohio's Mead Corp. photographs the flow of fibers in papermaking to keep a check on quality, and other rapid-fire cameras stand duty at the looms in textile mills to spot the reason for a thread break. General Dynamics located the cause of a hydrogen valve failure in the Centaur space vehicle by setting a Fairchild camera to watch it at simulated flight speeds...
...programmed 380 seconds, sent the rocket tumbling into an elliptical orbit ranging from 340 to 1,050 miles above the earth. But it was not the orbit that mattered, nor the fact that the 10,200-lb. Centaur was the largest U.S. satellite orbited to date. By proving that hydrogen engines would burn in space, Centaur showed that the U.S. space effort is on a sound propulsive track. The multistage Saturn boosters that will sling U.S. astronauts to the moon will also burn liquid hydrogen in their upper stages...
...million worth of frustration, a snow-white Centaur rocket flashed its hoofs high over Cape Kennedy last week and galloped into orbit. As its Atlas booster fell away, the Centaur's own nozzles bloomed with a blue, barely visible flame: the high-energy signature of burning hydrogen...
...Bootstraps. Designed to hurl more than a ton of instrument payloads all the way to the moon, the 28½-ft. Centaur generates 30,000 Ibs. of thrust with its two restartable Pratt & Whitney engines. The hydrogen fuel they burn has been the key-and the curse-of the Centaur system from the time it was born on engineers' drawing boards. As early as 1909, U.S. Rocket Pioneer Robert Goddard noted that hydrogen (in liquid form, known as LH.,) might prove to be the optimum chemical rocket fuel. Its light molecular weight, less than half that of standard liquid...
...more than 700 ground firings, the engine seemed ready for a test in the weightless environment of space. But the crucial first shot ended in naming failure before the engines could ignite. Just 55 seconds after liftoff, a weather shield tore loose, followed by a blazing rupture in a hydrogen fuel tank. With Centaur already 18 months behind schedule and Congressmen crying inept management NASA shifted the program from Marshall Space Flight Center, where Wernher von Braun's team was primarily concerned with the Saturn program, to the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. There tough-minded Director Abe Silverstein...