Word: ramjet
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...Tsien's rocket liner would be 78.9 ft. long and 8.86 ft. in diameter, with a loaded weight of 96,500 Ibs. It would have small wings and a ramjet as well as a rocket motor. Its maximum speed, 9,140 m.p.h., would carry the ship 1,200 miles on an elliptical course outside the atmosphere. As it curved down toward the earth, it would meet the air again and turn into a non-powered glider. Coasting through the air for another 1,800 miles, it would land at 150 m.p.h.-not much more than the landing speed...
Bush visualizes nests of robot weapons guarding strategic centers. Ramjet missiles would be loosed against the highest-flying, swiftest planes, which "could neither see them nor dodge them; they come too fast." The missiles carry proximity fuzes which, during the war, "multiplied the effectiveness of large antiaircraft batteries by five or ten." The fuze, which commands the scientist's awe as "a devilish device," may yet, he thinks, "bring a feeling of relative security to the world...
Last week the Navy announced that its gunners would soon have a target worthy of their fire: the Martin KDM-1, a pilotless plane powered with a ramjet engine, designed to fly close to the speed of sound. The little drone is carried into the air under the wing of a larger airplane and flown fast enough to start its ramjet. Then it is released and flies thenceforth under remote control, while the Navy gunners try to shoot it down. When its fuel is gone, the drone zooms high in the air. A parachute opens and it floats down...
...waterborne jet works on much the same principle as the airborne ramjet. It consists of a roughly cylindrical chamber with openings at both ends. As the engine moves forward, water comes in the front opening and is mixed with a "water reactive propellant." A "surface tension depressant" (wetting agent) is injected into the water too, presumably to help the fuel mix with the water stream or to help bubbles form...
What sort of engine would be used? Poole was vague. It would not be a nuclear turbojet, he said, or a steam turbine, or a ramjet. All these had been tried and found wanting. The atomic engine, said Poole, would be a "nuclear rocket." That was all he would say. The nature of the nuclear rocket, he said, is secret...