Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When engineers let their imaginations go-in a properly professional manner-they are apt to think about rockets, whose limit is above the sky. Last week a Manhattan meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers heard Professor Hsue-shen Tsien, Chinese-born rocket expert from Caltech, on the prospects in rocketeering. Most of Dr. Tsien's paper was technical, e.g., how to keep the walls of combustion chambers from melting. But his conclusion was clear and startling: present-day technology is capable of building a transcontinental rocket ship...
...Navy owned up last week to having an airplane, the Douglas D558-II Skyrocket, that has flown faster than sound "many times." Like the Air Force's pioneering XI, the Navy's Skyrocket is a rocket plane. But the X-I is intended to be dropped at high altitude from a B29, while the Skyrocket takes off under its own power. Inside its slim body is a powerful turbojet engine as well as the rocket motor. The turbojet is used first (with rocket assist at takeoff), to get the plane to high altitude. Then the rocket motor pushes...
With its swept-back wings and dual power plant, the Skyrocket is closer than the X-I to being a practical supersonic airplane. Flying on its turbojet alone, it has a respectable endurance: about half an hour. In combat, the rocket motor could give it brief bursts of superspeed...
...instruments of World War II: radar, the eye which helped save Britain during the Nazis' all-out bombing campaign; sonar, the underwater ear which helped break the Nazis' almost-decisive U-boat campaign; missiles, such as the V-i which "might well have stopped the [Normandy] invasion"; rocket-firing bazookas which can stop tanks; recoilless guns which can be carried by two men and have the power of 75-mm. howitzers...
...experts are pessimistic about rockets propelled by nuclear energy. But Britain's nuclear rocketeers are cheery. L. R.Shepherd, technician at the Harwell atomic project (Britain's Oak Ridge), thinks a rocket should be pushed into space by high pressure ammonia gas shooting through a white-hot uranium pile...