Word: poled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pinpoint. Discoverer II, cruising on its elliptical pole-to-pole course at 17,000 m.p.h. (ranging from 220 miles to 152 miles from the earth), was to have launched its capsule over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii on its 17th orbit. A retrorocket would slow it down to force its entry into the scorching atmosphere. Then an orange parachute (lined with aluminum for radar reflection) would pop at a preset speed, drop it gently toward the water. Eight Air Force C-119 flying boxcars, trailing 15-ft. by 30-ft. nylon harnesses, were to try snagging the package before...
...showed that Discoverer II was orbiting faster than anticipated: 90.5 minutes for the round trip instead of 94 minutes. Quickly, scientists pinpointed the spot where the automatic ejection would occur: the area of Norway's Spitzbergen archipelago, far beyond the Arctic Circle -some 700 miles from the North Pole. Finding the capsule in Spitzbergen's icy wastes would be hard enough. Tougher still was another problem: under agreement with Soviet Russia, which operates coal mines in Spitzbergen, Norway permits no military operations in the area, keeps the archipelago strictly, delicately neutral...
...Delivery. The son of a Phoenix College math and sociology teacher, Long began putting the shot in grammar school, started to show real promise at North Phoenix High School under Track Coach Vernon Wolfe, onetime University of Southern California pole vaulter. Wolfe put him to work lifting weights, had him study movies of O'Brien ("You might say he was a sort of hero of mine then." says Dallas). Slowly he mastered O'Brien's 180° body-spin delivery. Despite the fact that he was picked as an all-state tackle, Long gave up football...
Britain's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1915 was as foolish in conception as it was heroic in outcome. Both ends of the scale were weighted by heavy-jawed Sir Ernest ("The Boss'') Shackleton, who in 1909 had gone to within 97 miles of the South Pole. Shackleton had one trouble: he was a towering egotist. As an apprentice in the British merchant navy, he was termed "the most pigheaded, obstinate boy I have ever come across" by his first skipper. Born a middle-class Irishman, he burned to force his way to the top of Britain...
Though knighted and lionized at 35 for his 1909 journey to Antarctica, Shackleton in 1914 was frantic because the great goals were disappearing. The North Pole had fallen to U.S. Explorer Robert E. Peary in 1909, the South Pole to Norway's Roald Amundsen in 1911. Shackleton conceived a scheme of sailing to the Atlantic coast of Antarctica and sledging across the continent via the Pole to the Pacific. He called it "the largest and most striking of all journeys." The Royal Geographical Society was cool to the idea-as well it might be. The feat was not achieved...