Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...famous German V2, designed in 1939, still holds the altitude record for single-stage rockets: 114 miles.* This week the U.S. Navy showed pictures of the Viking, designed to top the V2. The Viking is slimmer and lighter (10,000 Ibs.) than the V-2 (see cut). In the picture, the complicated structure to the left of the rising rocket is a "gantry": a staging from which technicians can reach all parts of the rocket as it stands on its launching platform. When the rocket is ready for launching, the gantry is moved away...
...Viking's inner works are much like the V-2's: it burns alcohol and "lox" (liquid oxygen) in a single combustion chamber. Chief improvement is in the control mechanism. When a big rocket first takes off, the air is not moving past its fins fast enough to provide steering control. The Germans got around this difficulty by putting small, movable graphite vanes in the blast of hot gas from the combustion chamber. By deflecting the gas stream slightly when the rocket wobbled, the vanes kept it upright until it was moving fast enough for the outside fins...
...through dazzling stretches of the galaxy. One of the oldest forms of science fiction is the "Utopia story," in which a coherent history of an ideal world is sketched out. A popular form is the "prophecy story," in which the consequences of man's inventive ingenuity in, say, rocket ships, are thought out. Subject matter ranges from the zoology of other planets to apocalyptic portraits of the world after it has been destroyed in the Third, Fourth or Fifth World...
...basic weapon for air combat, thinks McNarney, will be the "air-to-air" rocket. It will not have to be aimed very accurately, for it will "home" on its target (probably attracted by radar-wave reflections), chase after it at supersonic speed, and explode by a proximity fuse when it gets within killing range. Such rockets presumably will be used by bombers for defense as well as by fighters for attack. Their development into "operational missiles," says McNarney, will not take long...
Some expressions that might have misled a listener in the early '40s, or sent him fruitlessly to the old Collegiate, are now so well known that people hardly need to look them up. But they are in now-ruptured duck, air sleeve, biological warfare, rocket engine, guided missile, jet propulsion and genocide...