Word: pad
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Missiles and satellite-launching rockets are plenty complicated in themselves, but the pads from which they take off are even more complex. They are tangles of cranes, wires, dugouts and flame-deflectors, and as they increase in size they soar in cost. Besides being expensive, the launching pads are vulnerable; if a present-day rocket explodes on its pad, it may do millions of dollars of damage. The pad for the upcoming Saturn rocket, for example, will cost something like $30 million, and if a Saturn explodes on takeoff, it will destroy most of this investment and spread devastation...
...Doppler Effect. Lofted by an Air Force Thor-Able-Star rocket. Transit I-B slanted around the world from 51° N. to 51° S. and settled into an elliptical orbit (apogee, 475 miles; perigee, 235 miles), sending radio signals from the moment it left the pad. From Texas to Hampshire, England, tracking stations sent information to a computing center near Washington, D.C. In future models, orbit-predicting data will be quickly rebroadcast to the satellite, which will remember its daily itinerary on magnetic tape, constantly announce it from space (the day-to-day orbital variations are minuscule...
With a huge gush of smoke and flame, the three-stage Thor-Able rocket last week roared from its Cape Canaveral launching pad, soon to swirl its 270-lb. package into orbit around the earth. To the scientific skeptics who claim that satellites are little more than spectacular stunts, that package provided a spectacularly practical answer: looking down from hundreds of miles in space, it could take and transmit pictures of the earth and its cloud-splotched atmosphere. At the very least...
...confident. On the floor, nobody bothered to keep score. Republican Minority Leader Charles Halleck sat quietly relaxed; Ohio's William McCulloch, the G.O.P. floor manager for the bill, dawdled with his yellow pencil; the South's floor manager, Louisiana's Edwin Willis, scribbled on a note pad; New York's Emanuel Celler, the Democrats' floor manager, even left the chamber during the count. At length, Speaker Sam Rayburn spoke the finish: "On this vote, the yeas are 311, the nays...
...better or worse, air defense in Canada is inextricably tied to the U.S.'s ill-starred Bomarc B antiaircraft missile. Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker has found it to be mostly worse: every time a Bomarc B failed to soar from its test pad at Cape Canaveral, Canada's Liberal and CCF (socialist) Opposition parties gleefully assaulted the Bomarc as a dying bird. In the process they winged Tory plans to rely on two Canadian Bomarc bases and nine aging squadrons of CF-100 interceptors as the country's only home defense against the bomber threat...