Word: liquid-fuel
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...Prussian Baron Magnus von Braun, is director of the development operations division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala., stands out as the inspirational as well as the scientific leader of the Men of Jupiter. At 18 Von Braun was working with crude liquid-fuel rockets, using Berlin's municipal dump; one day a black sedan stopped. Three German army officers stepped out, offered Von Braun military facilities to carry on his rocket work. At 20 he was chief of the entire German rocket program; at 32, working in the Nazi rocket center at Peenem...
...conquest of space," says Rocket Engineer Harold W. Ritchey, "depends on solid propellants." Dr. Ritchey, chief rocket man for Thiokol Chemical Corp., manufacturer of solid propellants, backs up his flat statement in Astronautics. He has no hope that liquid-fuel rocket engines ("a remarkable chemical processing plant") will ever get spaceships into space...
...trouble with liquid-fuel engines, says Ritchey, is their unreliability, which "is a matter of common knowledge to those who read newspapers." It is hard to make pump-fed engines much more powerful than they are now, and "the reliability of a single liquid-fuel engine is so low that even the most optimistic may quail at the idea of grouping more than a few turbopump systems into a clustered stage." Rocket engines using a solid propellant fire perfectly almost every time; they can be used in large clusters with expectation that all of them will do their duty...
...clusters will not be necessary, Dr. Ritchey says, because solid-fuel engines (unlike their liquid-fuel rivals) can be stepped up in power almost indefinitely. To show how this can be done, he starts with the semisecret Recruit rocket, which burns solid fuel, is 9 in. in diameter, weighs about 350 Ibs. and has 35,000 Ibs. of thrust. Using a set of formulas, he scales it up 50 times (perfectly feasible, he says) and comes out with a rocket that weighs 43,000,800 Ibs. and has 87,500,000 Ibs. of thrust, twice as much as is needed...
...Russians have an operational stockpile of several hundred shorter-range (800 to 1,200 miles) ballistic missiles deployed in more than 50 bases, with a range into Europe and the Far East. The U.S. Air Force is ahead of its schedule on developing its first IRBM, Douglas' liquid-fuel, 1,500-mile Thor. It has test-fired ten Thors, five successfully, two part-successfully, has a production line going, expects to deploy well upward of 20 Thors into Europe with "initial operational capability" this year. Thor is guided by an inertial direction system backed up by an alternate method...