Word: nosing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Good Dusting. Von Braun went-and fast. The very next week, he reserved Cape Canaveral range time for the night of Jan. 29, 1958, between 10:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. (he would have hit it right on the nose except for bad weather). Jupiter-C had been ready for months. Says Von Braun: "All she needed was a good dusting. We simply took every bit of care on her that was humanly possible. That is the most you can do and the least you can do in missilery...
...borrowing Army research and development funds to keep going. Said Medaris: "We bend every effort we can to make up for whatever handicaps or checks have been thrown into it, and we tire people and wear them out, but we get it done." With the job of testing a nose cone for Jupiter, the Huntsville team kept going on Jupiter-C. Actually Jupiter-C-a bundle of rockets beefing up the Army's Redstone-was hardly kin to the sophisticated, sleek Jupiter itself. But while other services hooted at its "brute-force approach" to space, Jupiter-C once flew...
...stage, which contributed most of the push into space, was the familiar, well-tested Redstone, fitted for the occasion with slightly longer fuel tanks, and burning a hydrazine-based, exotic fuel called Hydyne, which gave more thrust than its motor's usual diet of alcohol. Stuck on its nose was an awkward-looking, cylindrical "bucket" mounted on a bearing so that it could be spun, and containing a cluster of 14 small, solid-fuel rockets, 40 in. long and 6 in. in diameter. Atop the bucket was a single, 80-in., solid-fuel rocket with the satellite proper forming...
...thrust of the first-stage rocket motor lifted it off the ground at a fairly fast clip. The first stage burned for 150 seconds. When its fuel was gone, about 60 miles above the earth, most of the Redstone dropped away, leaving only a short section of the nose attached to the spinning bucket. As it zoomed upward at several thousand miles per hour, a gyroscopically controlled device turned the missile's attitude toward the horizontal by blowing jets of compressed air through nozzles. This process took about 240 seconds. By that time the bird was at the peak...
Obeying his electronic command, eleven of the small rockets in the bucket fired, blasting away the nose of the Redstone. They burned for six seconds. Two seconds after that, three more rockets fired, pushing free the empty shells of the first eleven. The central rocket carrying the satellite fired last. It spurted ahead and alone, and reached orbital velocity of more than 18,000 m.p.h...