Word: meteorics
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...difficulties were staggering. Every aspect of the project called for prodigies of technology. But the most formidable problem of all was one that should have been familiar to anyone who ever saw a meteor turn into a trail of fire in the night sky. It was the problem of "re-entry": how to get an ICBM warhead, with its protective nose cone, back through the earth's atmosphere without its being burned into sky-streaking embers. As history may one day note, it was at an Ithaca, N.Y. cocktail party that one of the most significant early steps toward...
...Union ridiculed the Western craze for flying saucers. But ever since the first Sputnik, the Russians have indulged in their own kind of science fiction about possible visitors from outer space. One Aleksandr Kazantsev theorized that the great Tunguska depression in Siberia, actually caused by the fall of a meteor in 1908, had really resulted from the explosion of a nuclear-powered spaceship attempting to land on earth. Reputable Soviet meteor experts and astronomers ridiculed Kazantsev's theory and accused him of being a charlatan and a cheap sensationalist, but his theories continued to turn up in the Literary...
...interest to play the commercial circuits. In the next few months it will be shown as an added attraction in several thousand U.S. movie houses. Made by former Disney Staffer John Sutherland, Rhapsody sets out to tell a sort of child's history of steel from the first meteor that ever hit the earth to the first manned rocket that leaves it, and most of the time Moviemaker Sutherland proves a slick entertainer and a painless pedagogue. Unhappily, the music of Oscar-Winning Dmitri Tiomkin, who is probably the world's loudest composer, bangs away on the sound...
Most of the moon's hidden face is covered with what appears to be mountains, which always look brighter than seas. The Russians named one conspicuous series the Soviet Range; the rest of the area is probably, a Jacqwork of circular meteor craters. The published pictures were taken at almost "full moon" from Lunik's point of view, i.e., with the sun directly "overhead." At such a time, even steep slopes near the center of the moon's disk cast no shadows and are therefore hard to photograph. Other pictures may show many more craters, cracks, valleys...
...Holes & Meteors. The apparent scarcity of seas on the far side of the moon will keep moon experts theorizing for many years. The seas are really flat, low plains filled with dust or lava. They must have been formed rather late in the moon's history, because few meteor craters pit their surfaces. Astronomer Gerard Kuiper of the University of Chicago thinks that the seas were made by the impact of asteroids up to 90 miles in diameter, which blasted great holes in the crust at a time when the moon's interior was hot and plastic. Dark...