Word: liquidations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What fuels do the Russians burn to make their Sputniks fly so fast? Wild rumors last week gave them credit for wonder-working superfuels. Not necessarily. Conventional rocket fuels such as kerosene and liquid oxygen, if skillfully used, could do the job. But superfuels are coming along-in both the U.S. and Russia...
When chemists dream their fanciest dreams, they imagine powering a rocket with liquid hydrogen and liquid ozone (03). This pair is tops for energy. Its reaction has a specific impulse of 373. The specific impulse of the traditional kerosene-oxygen combination is only...
...Seconds, $5,000. Liquid hydrogen is bulky, expensive and extremely hard to handle. Ozone is expensive, poisonous and explosive. Another dream oxidant, liquid fluorine, is about as bad. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics has been working on liquid fluorine as an oxidant at a cost as high as $5,000 for a 30-second test of a smallish rocket, but no one thinks that fluorine will come into wide use soon...
...important for keeping down the rocket's size and frontal area. Ease of ignition is almost a must. The best combinations are "hypergolic," igniting spontaneously as soon as mixed. Bad qualities to be avoided are toxicity, corrosiveness, heat instability (exploding when hot) and a tendency to evaporate like liquid oxygen. No fuel is perfect. Beryllium compounds might be good if beryllium were not so scarce and so poisonous...
Meanwhile, the Navy has gone on developing its own IRBM to be launched from submarines or surface ships. Weighing only one-third as much as Thor or Jupiter, and burning easier-to-handle solid fuel instead of liquid, the Navy's Polaris promises to be a more efficient all-round IRBM than either of its rivals. If it were as far along in development as Thor and Jupiter, a case could be argued for making it the nation's production-line IRBM...