Word: lunik
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From first to last, Moscow's 21st Communist Party Congress was Nikita Khrushchev's show. It opened with his boast that Russia is first in the firmament, with its Lunik and its "mass-produced" intercontinental rockets, and his seven-year economic plan would make it first on earth. It closed with the cocky boss, an energetic 64, firing some of the roughest and rudest taunts that he has ever let fly at the West. In between, 86 Soviet delegates and 45 representatives of foreign Communist parties paid telling tribute to "the distinguished activity," "the tremendous organizing work...
...tribesmen-volleyed cheers. This was a Congress of Victors, and on this day when the Communist heads of a third of mankind were met to hear him tell it, there was no doubt who the winner was. Here was Nikita Khrushchev, 64, racing through the statistics of his triumphs-Lunik, Sputniks, "mass-produced" ICBMs, new targets for industry, farming and education. Gone was the last Congress' talk of collective leadership; gone were those saber-toothed old commissars (Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov et al.), who had been bloodlessly banished and disgraced...
...close is interplanetary voyaging? The great weight (2,925 lbs. of instrumented payload) of Sputnik III proved to the space-wise that the Russians had practically licked the initial problems of interplanetary flight. U.S. scientists reckon that the Soviets' Lunik, with only a little more speed, would have swooped past Mars and soared out toward the asteroids. George Paul Sutton, professor of aeronautical engineering at M.I.T., believes that present propulsion systems with a little refinement can send a space vehicle as far as Jupiter or even to Saturn, 750 million miles from the earth...
Radioactive Moon. Russia's Lunik carried an instrument to measure the radioactivity of the moon's surface. Neither Kuiper nor Gold believes that it could have worked at the distance (4,660 miles) at which the Lunik swept past the moon, but they would be grateful for any information that the Russians choose to release. Dr. Kuiper believes that the moon's surface is blazing with radioactivity. On the earth, he says, the thick layer of air is the shielding equivalent of 3 ft. of lead or 33 ft. of water, protects the surface from many kinds...
...unsolved problem is communication. It will do no good to send a space probe to Mars if communication with it is lost, as happened to Lunik soon after it passed the moon. Radio signals can cover any desired distance if given sufficient power, but the only power sources now available are heavy, short-lived chemical batteries or feeble solar batteries. To tell its story properly from the distance of Mars, a probe needs as much power as an earth-side radio station. One possibility is a nuclear battery getting its energy from radioactive materials. Another (one form of which...