Word: liquidize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Solid-fuel rockets are the dream weapons of military rocketeers. They have no pumps or valves to go wrong and are always ready to fire. Their big trouble is that they are harder to control than liquid-fuel rockets, whose small combustion chambers, fed by flexible pipes, can be mounted on gimbals. When a liquid-fuel rocket takes off, it can switch its gas jet from side to side, correcting any tendency to veer off course. But solid-fuel rockets have no separate combustion chamber, only a nozzle to form the gases into a high-speed jet. Usually the nozzle...
...Pipe. Another system is to mount the nozzle at the end of a large, flexible coupling so it can switch from side to side like the combustion chamber of a liquid-fuel rocket. This is extremely difficult because the flexible pipe must carry the giant flow of hot, high-speed, high-pressure gas without leaking or burning out. But Ritchey implied that it can be done in an efficient way that causes little drag loss...
...thinking about air travel in the 1890s. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, wrote about space flight with amazing prescience. He chose the rocket as the only possible space engine and derived mathematically the speed that its exhaust gases would have to attain. He decided that it should burn liquid fuel. This conclusion he published in 1898, when not even an airplane had left the ground...
...bench-testing in secrecy the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Four years later, he made his first flight tests. His tiny, ungainly gadget, launched from a relative's farm near Auburn. Mass., hardly got off the ground, but it was the true precursor of today's mighty rockets. Three years later, an 11-ft. rocket climbed 90 ft. Its noise attracted the local cops and stirred up so much opposition that Goddard left Massachusetts for thinly populated New Mexico. There his rockets climbed higher and higher. In 1935 one reached the sensational height...
...original cause of the accident is still unknown. Presumably, enough plutonium somehow got into the tank to support a fission chain reaction. The resulting burst of radiation ionized the air and caused the blue flash. The reacting liquid probably boiled, separating the plutonium and stopping the reaction in a few seconds. That was too late for Kelley...