Word: missilemen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tomorrow, if scientists have their way, Air Force heroes may all be ground-bound, button-pushing missilemen. Today these heroes are still the crinkle-eyed young men wearing silver wings, the plane jockeys who earn their day's pay at a high scream-somewhere around the speed of sound. Their quick, death-weighted decisions would scare a six-gun cowpoke back into the saloon, and the wonder is that their work is still a rarity on television. But last week televiewers had their fill of flying-in both fact and fiction. And even when Air Force technical advisers were...
Steady Platform. In the blockhouse, Debus listened as the clipped argot of the missilemen's countdown came over the loudspeaker: "Telemetry-on. Radar beacon-on. DOVAP*-on." Hundreds of men both in and out of the blockhouse were doing thousands of things. The rocket itself had come awake. In its guidance section, a gyroscopically stabilized platform was accurately aligned with the intended course. When the rocket rose into the sky, the platform would keep steady in space, allowing the rocket's computer brain to steer by it as if it were both a compass and a horizon...
JUST as the Eisenhower Administration and the Air Force were pretty well convinced that the U.S. could see itself safely through the "missile gap" of the early 1960s with Strategic Air Command bombers and a slender intercontinental missile program, Air Force missilemen turned up in Washington last week with a warning and a plan. The warning: reliance on plane-borne SAC will not surely give the U.S. the deterrent it needs. The plan: step up production of the well-tested Atlas missile. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Atlas...
...Weak Spots. But, say Air Force missilemen, the "diversified" deterrent of the early 19605 has weak spots, both specific and strategic. U.S. strike power is clearly supreme...
...concentration on closing the military-missile gap, the Eisenhower Administration neglected the less pressing, less obvious challenge of space. While the Russians were working on big rockets capable of carrying hefty objects into outer space, U.S. missilemen were working on lighter, slimmer, more "sophisticated" missiles-marvels of engineering, but designed for earthly military tasks. Only in mid-1955, as part of the U.S.'s International Geophysical Year effort, did the U.S. at long last undertake its first serious satellite project, and even then the Eisenhower Administration, deciding to keep space research "peaceful" and separate from ballistic-missile programs, settled...