Word: hydrogenate
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...Liquid hydrogen is rugged stuff to fool with, so cold (boiling point: -252.7° C. at atmospheric pressure) that steel cracks on sudden contact. It must be elaborately refrigerated or it will flash into vapor. Even a small leak is highly explosive. The 150 gal. in Berkeley's chamber have the explosive power...
...electromagnet surrounding the chamber had to weigh 200 tons. The great machine had to be movable, but wheels were too unstable. Instead, it was given four massive feet on which it could be walked around like a mechanical dinosaur. Leak detectors were installed everywhere to watch for escaping hydrogen; 104 alarm circuits inside the machine flash lights, ring bells and honk horns at the slightest hint of trouble. In a serious emergency (e.g., the failure of the refrigeration system) the entire stock of liquid hydrogen can be dumped through a pipe down a canyon and into a spherical tank...
Balance or Blow. The engine is simple enough-in nuclear theory: a high-power density reactor (lots of power from a small volume) honeycombed with channels through which a large amount of hydrogen gas can be blown. The hydrogen cools the reactor, keeps it from melting or vaporizing. At the same time, the hydro gen is heated to a temperature (about 2,000°-3,000° C.) just below that of the reactor, expands enormously, and blows out of the nozzle in a high-speed jet. Hydrogen is essential because its molecules are the smallest known, and the smaller...
Kiwi-A's actual thrust is probably quite small. The difficulties are so great that no one knew whether such an engine would work at all. The reactor must run extremely hot; otherwise the hydrogen will not form an effective gas jet. Thus Kiwi-A's innards are probably made of tricky, heat-resistant metals such as tungsten, tantalum and molybdenum. Control is far more difficult than with chemical engines, because the flow of hydrogen must be balanced perfectly against the production of energy by the reactor. A slight maladjustment of the controls might melt the nuclear engine...
EWEX KNIGHT CORP. grew out of the Harvard doctoral thesis of Harold Ewen. Working with Harvard's Nobel-Prizewinning Physicist Edward Purcell (in '52, for nuclear magnetic measurement), Ewen developed and built equipment to locate and trace hydrogen clouds several hundred thousand light years distant from earth. This resulted in no less than a remapping of the solar system. With a fellow scientist's $1,000 and his own theories, Ewen started his company in 1952. turned out radiometers (receiving systems for radio telescopes), radio sextants, microwave components. Last year Ewen Knight chalked...