Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Glaring in the darkness like some colossal firework, a 98-ft. rocket blasted off a launching pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. one night last week. As it zoomed skyward, trailing a gaudy glow of reds and greens, a watcher in the Canaveral blockhouse gasped out an awed, unscientific tribute: "Isn't she beautiful...
...biggest rocket the U.S. had ever launched, a three-stage Atlas-Able, was off on the U.S.'s most ambitious space shot so far. The mission: to send an intricate, 372-lb. payload of instruments into the vicinity of the moon-and if all went well, into orbit around the moon. The rocket also carried a weighty cargo of hope and national pride: Nikita Khrushchev had kicked off his trip to the U.S. with the Russian moon shot; a U.S. answer exploded on the pad while he was in the U.S. Here, on the eve of the President...
Into the Sea. Some 40 seconds after the Atlas-Able blasted off, a flame-colored chunk fell off the rocket and hurtled into the sea. "I've never seen this before," growled a watching Air Force officer. "We're in trouble. We're in trouble. I'm sure we are." The rocket kept soaring until it disappeared from sight out over the Atlantic. But an hour later Program Director Adolph K. Thiel, somber and red-eyed, told waiting newsmen the unhappy news: "We didn't make it. Something happened. We don't know what...
Until the '60s. If the U.S. had an adequate space program, the next step would be to remedy the trouble with the nose fairing and try again. But the shocking fact is that the U.S. has no more Atlas-Able rockets available for trying again. All the Atlases allotted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have already been assigned to other urgent space programs, and NASA has no spare funds to order additional Atlases. The bigger space vehicles that NASA has under development will not be ready for launching for more than a year: Vega (Atlas plus upper...
...days of jet and rocket power, aviation's headline-getters usually fly worlds faster, farther and higher than such lonesome greats of the olden days as Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post and Lindbergh. But the airman who comes closest to matching the oldtime sense of personal challenge and adventure in the flying business is the record-seeking light-plane pilot. Last week Minnesota-born Max Conrad, 57, bumped onto the runway at El Paso's International Airport after soloing a little Piper Comanche a nonstop 6,911 miles across the Atlantic from Casablanca...