Word: launcher
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Bulwark of the U.S. team, despite a month-long layoff with a strained shoulder muscle, was Tony Trabert. He had won 16 of his last 18 tournaments, including the Wimbledon and French championships. At first it seemed that he might beat cocky, towheaded Lew Hoad, Australia's rocket-launcher. He took the first set, 6-4. Then Hoad, in his finest form in two years, began slamming out a cannonball serve that Trabert could not match or break. Bothered by a blister on his racket hand, Trabert weakened in the third set, dropped five straight games. In the fourth...
...result is a bewildering jumble of new forms and shapes-forged, soldered, puddled, riven and wrought-that can look as crude as slagheap clinkers, as ethereal as tomorrow's TV aerials or as menacing as the latest rocket launcher...
...trick is done with a massive trailer that the Air Force calls a "zero length launcher." Normally used to launch Martin Matador guided missiles, the trailer has folding. steel arms that slant the missile upward so its powerful rocket motors can skim it into the air. The same apparatus, only slightly modified, has been found to work with full-size, inhabited jet planes...
...full power, an enormous flame and a cloud of smoke spurt out of the booster bottle. In a few seconds the plane is airborne. The exhausted rocket drops off, and the pilot proceeds. His sudden departure resembles a scene from a space-flight movie, and the ground around the launcher is overcast with smoke, but at no time does the pilot experience more than a moderate four "Gs" of acceleration...
Among these is the "Honest John," already in the hands of troops. Mounted on a highly mobile, self-propelled launcher...