Word: polars
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...began in Rome, on a broadcasting station's quiz show, where one of the questions was: "Can penguins live at the North Pole?" KLM had just inaugurated its polar service from Amsterdam to Tokyo, so we took two penguins to the Arctic to find out. It was not easy to arrange their accommodations...
...northwest of Los Angeles-Strategic Air Command's Vandenberg Air Force Base. The West Coast missile complex is designed to take up where Cape Canaveral leaves off; i.e., primarily to shoot operational missiles and train crews to handle them. One Western advantage : satellites can be flung thence into polar orbits (see diagram) without hazard to populated areas...
Orbit Geography. The Discoverers will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Florida's Cape Canaveral has the wrong geography for polar orbits. If a satellite launcher is aimed either north or south from the cape, it must pass over densely populated areas while still in the dangerous early stages of its flight. The nearest land south of Vandenberg is the Pitcairn Island group in the South Pacific, more than 4,000 miles away...
...turns inside it. If the satellite's period of revolution is 90 minutes, it makes 16 north-south passes around the earth in a day, each pass being 22.5 degrees of longitude (about 1,560 miles at the equator) farther to the west than its predecessor. So a polar satellite, theoretically at least, can take pictures of the entire earth every twelve hours, thus act as a kind...
Down on a Band-Aid. The rescue alert flashed within minutes. Air Forcemen, by now well oriented to the peculiarities of polar geography, knew that they could make a rescue just as fast from Strategic Air Command bases in Newfoundland and Greenland as from Alaskan Command points. From SAC's Thule Air Base in Greenland, cover planes flew across the earth's top to circle Ice Skate and keep in touch lest the camp homer beacon fail. At Harmon A.F.B. in Newfoundland, SAC put on standby two crack C-123J crews who were familiar with ice landings. This...