Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With the Explorer VI paddle-wheel satellite wheeling triumphantly overhead, U.S. rocket pads had their busiest week yet. Unhappily, results were mixed...
...Also at Canaveral, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration tried to fling into orbit a10-lb. plastic and aluminum inflatable sphere that would circle the earth like an oversized beach ball (diameter: 12 ft.), measuring friction in the outer reaches of the atmosphere. The three-stage Juno II rocket itself (a modification of the Army's operational workhorse Jupiter) blasted off without a hitch, but the beach ball never achieved orbit, probably through a failure in the attitude control system...
...California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Air Force launched Discoverer V, putting a ton of hardware into orbit, including the 1,700-lb. second-stage rocket and a 300-lb. instrument package-a new record for U.S. satellite payloads (but still far behind Russia's 2,134-lb. Sputnik III). After 17 trips through its polar orbit, retrorockets were to plunge Discoverer V back into the atmosphere, and C-119 transport planes-trailing trapezelike devices to snare the descending parachute-were waiting 700 miles southwest of Hawaii. But Discoverer V was never heard from again...
...borrowed radio equipment from a colleague, set it up and trained it in the direction of Nevada, where the AEC was about to fire a series of atom bombs. To his delight, the oscilloscope showed telltale wiggles. Two months later, he picked up the trail of the Russian rocket that launched Sputnik I. Enlisting the aid of other colleagues, he turned his attention to missile launchings at Cape Canaveral. There he ran into bureaucracy. None of the armed forces would give him notice of projected firings; Tepee's men finally had to set up their own system of volunteer...
Wrinkles Ahead. Navy enthusiasts point out that Tepee stations are low-powered and relatively cheap, talk of a system of six stations that would monitor any rocket the Russians set off or atomic bomb that they tested above ground. Thaler himself makes no such claims, recognizes that there are still plenty of wrinkles. "We know the theory and the equipment works.'' said Thaler last week, "and our experiments have been successful from the beginning, but we will have to learn a lot more before we will be able to say we have a system. We have been trying...