Word: lox
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...lead to Cape Canaveral's heavily guarded gates. Security guards check for pink windshield stickers, examine badges, wave the privileged on to their work. Construction workers peel off toward half-finished launching facilities. Others spike off to hangars, laboratories, snack wagons and a hundred separate sites. At the lox plant, they run the machinery that daily chews up a chunk of damp Florida air and transforms it into 75 tons of liquid oxygen...
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...
...time when the U.S. must have the power of instant retaliation, the weakness of the U.S.'s growing family of liquid oxygen ("lox") -and-kerosene-fueled missiles is that they cannot retaliate instantly. Time needed to fuel the Air Force's test-ICBM Atlas: a minimum 15 minutes after an hour-long countdown. Time needed to fuel the Air Force's test IRBM Thor, even using a promising but not fully tested method of "force-feeding": eight minutes. The U.S.'s lox missiles could conceivably be knocked out by the enemy before they could be fueled...
...missile's complex guidance systems; the Navy insists that it can control the blastoff, but it has not yet tested its technique on the missile. Another key problem: how to shut off the solid-charge propulsion at the precise point needed to drop the missile on target (in lox missiles this is accomplished by turning off a valve). The Navy says it has solved this problem in the laboratories and on test vehicles, admits it has yet to test it out on a missile...
...Raborn, officer in charge of Polaris: "He is the only man in the Navy who has a blank check. All he has to do is say 'I want,' and he gets." If the faults can be whipped, even the most loyal Air Force birdmen admit that their lox systems will probably give way to solid fuels in the next round of missile development...