Word: liquidations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fume & Smoke. At 9 o'clock one night last week the Explorer was ready. Lox vapors (liquid oxygen) waved in the floodlights' glow. In Central Control, scientific and technical missilemen tended their network of instruments. In the Pentagon at that moment, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker and the Jupiter's top Scientist Wernher von Braun joined a score of other military and civilian officials in the Army's telecommunications room, seated themselves at a table before two huge screens, one enlarging teletype messages from the Cape, the other carrying Pentagon messages back to the site. Elaborately...
...heart-leaping minute of the countdown squawked over an intercom box. At 9:42 a mournful warning horn sounded from the launching area. Two red warning lights blinked steadily. The white rocket fumed and smoked, growing whiter and colder under the pebbled casing of ice caused by the subfreezing liquid oxygen. The service structure moved away on its tracks...
...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...