Word: pads
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...feel of it, we tried some experiments. With the plane refueled, we headed back to the acrobatic area. Brett's usual rear-seat man, ist Lieut. Arthur Brattkus, had prepared a mental-alertness test for me during our coffee break. On the back pages of a scratch pad he had written three elementary problems in arithmetic. These represented a mild foretaste of what a space pilot might have to do in the weightless state. Would my gravity-free brain be clear enough to solve them...
...first parabola of the second series, I flipped over the thigh pad to tackle the first problem: multiply 13 by .9. The reaction was surprising. Squinting over the oxygen mask, I could not be sure whether there was a decimal point in the multiplier or just a speck in the paper. Irrationally, I felt hostile to Brattkus for not having been more careful. Just as irrationally, the decision I had to make (was it a decimal point or wasn't it?) seemed momentously important. I got off this dilemma by doing the multiplication, writing the answers for both possibilities...
...good 1,600 miles southeastward from Florida last week, watchers aboard the Navy's salvage ship Escape spotted a white object as it hurtled out of the sky and plunged into the Atlantic. It was the nose cone of a Jupiter IRBM, launched only minutes earlier from a pad at the Cape Canaveral missile test center. Hoisted aboard Escape, the recovered cone proved that the Army had solved both the reentry problem and the accuracy problem. Hitting the target area at a range of 1,600 miles was a feat of marksmanship considerably more remarkable than nicking a dime...
...really dependable safety device, say Huston and Miller, should tell on its own when the reactor is starting an excursion. The best way to trigger its action is to combine a pad of material containing uranium with a layer of high-melting solder. When the neutrons in the reactor rise above a critical level, showing that an excursion has started, the uranium fissions at a rate that creates enough heat to melt the solder. Then high-pressure gas will shoot neutron-absorbing poison into the reactor. Even if other controls have failed, this last-ditch nuclear fire extinguisher will keep...
...altitude of 38 miles, the first stage, more than half the projectile, apparently disintegrated after depleting its fuel supply; and after leaving the launching pad vertically, the rocket arched to a more level course almost a mile up and then disappeared in the southeastern skies...