Word: liquidations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Instant Thrust. The Navy first hit full speed with the Polaris system early last year, after it ditched the idea of adapting the Army's bulky liquid-fuel Jupiter for shipboard use. As Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke said, the Navy needed "an IRBM with salt water in its veins." Burke picked peppery, redheaded Rear Admiral William Francis Raborn Jr., 52, to run the Polaris program, tossed Raborn a bankroll of $37 million for a start. "Red" Raborn, who moves so fast that he will only drink instant coffee (and sometimes a Scotch-and-water), rounded...
...breakthroughs came at an awesome rate. Raborn needed a reliable solid fuel, for liquid fuels are both too volatile and too bulky for shipboard use. Aerojet-General Corp. and Thiokol Chemical Corp. brought out solid fuels with a wallop ("as simple," says Raborn, "as the comb in your pocket"). Even so, solids presented a big problem: how to cut off burning with the split-second precision necessary if the missile is to land on target. (Liquid oxygen can be shut off mechanically with a valve.) The solution: a design called a retrorocket that automatically blasts portholes in the fuel chamber...
Load into Speed. Liquid-fuel rockets burn their fuel only as fast as their pumps, which must be kept light, can deliver it to the combustion chamber. This limitation keeps the thrust comparatively low, and low thrust means a long burning time. Thus, a heavy load of fuel is carried to high altitude against the pull of gravitation before it is burned and its energy turned into speed...
Solid-fuel rockets avoid most of this waste of energy by burning their fuel very fast-in a few seconds, if desirable. Instead of struggling painfully off the ground as liquid-fuel rockets do, the solid-fuel bird can be gone in a flash. Its higher speed while still in the dense lower atmosphere costs something in aerodynamic drag, but since solid-fuel rockets have no pumps, valves or plumbing, they are more compact and can slip through the air more easily...
...m.p.h.), an error of I ft. per sec. in its top speed will make it miss its target by 500 yds. So when the desired speed has been reached, the thrust must be cut off accurately in a small fraction of a second. This is not too difficult with liquid-fuel rockets, whose thrust can be cut by shutting off the fuel. Solid-fuel rockets cannot be controlled in this simple way, but other effective ways have been developed. One of them is to blow off part of the nozzle, or the pressure-wall, when the right speed has been...