Word: pads
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...darkness at Cape Canaveral, the morning star and the thin edge of a waning moon graced the eastern sky. Their light faded, and at 6:45 the sun burst bright and yellow above a cloud bank to bathe the slender dark-green-and-white Vanguard rocket standing on Launch Pad 18A. In Vanguard's nose was a 3¼-lb. antenna-horned space satellite that symbolized at once the hope and despair of all the men at the Cape. Temperamental Vanguard, twice a spectacular failure, was once again ready for the shoot: the countdown was onT minus 16 minutes...
...know that he is not the same man he was. Their faith forces Raju to acquire the virtues he has mimicked. He fasts to the death and knows that the drought is over, that "it's raining in the hills." The Guide floats as gently as a lily pad on the surface of Indian life and yet suggests the depths beneath. It manages to describe a saint who is neither born nor made but simply happens, almost like the weather...
Orbiting Wheel: supervisor at a busy launching pad...
...birds just arrived from manufacturing points. In the concrete blockhouses, experts cluster over their consoles, check the hundreds of telemetry receiving boxes that are stacked around the room like filing cabinets. They peer out of their redoubts through the eyes of closed-circuit TV cameras spotted around the launch pad (once, a camera zoomed in at the base of a gantry to discover a group of unwary poker players). At Central Control, sports-shirted young engineers tune in on an eleven-hour countdown that precedes a missile firing, timing each monotonous checkoff point with the red-flashing sequencer count-light...
...acquaintances in the theater for fear of compromising his integrity. (He met Katharine Cornell and Thornton Wilder for the first time at his party.) A demanding but undogmatic critic, Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated ('17) Atkinson writes his views in pencil in a neat hand on a ruled yellow pad. Against one of journalism's toughest deadlines-he usually has barely an hour to catch an edition after the first-night curtain falls-he sends his polished copy through in one-paragraph "takes." When a review is finished, he reads the proof but seldom changes a word...