Word: rocketeers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite those lost years, the U.S. has just about closed the ballistic-missile gap. As most U.S. missilemen see it, the U.S.'s ballistic missiles are, militarily speaking, superior to the U.S.S.R.'s. The Russian rocket that carried the Lunik into orbit produced a lot more thrust than any U.S. missile, but if the military job of a ballistic missile is to travel accurately from one point on the globe to another with a warhead in its nose, U.S. missiles appear fit to do the job at least as well as their bulkier Russian counterparts...
...five satellites into orbit (Explorers I, III and IV, Vanguard, Atlas); fired two near-miss lunar probes (Pioneers I and III); started on an array of other satellite or space-probe projects; let development contracts with the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation Inc. for space-rocket engines with thrusts of 1,000,000 lbs. or more; pushed a man-in-space undertaking, Project Mercury, that is scheduled for announcement this month. But despite the flurry of projects, the U.S. has made disappointingly little progress toward deciding on large, long-range space objectives and creating organizations to carry them...
...Research Projects Agency and the civilian-bossed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (see chart). On paper the division is clear and logical: ARPA, headed by sometime General Electric Executive Roy Johnson, oversees military projects (the Discoverer eye-in-the-sky program, a 1,000,000-lb.-thrust multi-chamber rocket engine); NASA, under Engineer T. Keith Glennan, oversees civilian projects (Project Mercury, a 1,000,000-lb.-thrust single-chamber engine). But the division is arbitrary, a response to prejudices and rivalries rather than to the realities of the challenge. More serious than the inevitable duplications between ARPA and NASA...
Newton's Rails. But the basic rules of space flight have been known for centuries. The Chinese, who invented rockets about 1200, did not theorize about them, but Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion, published in 1687, not only explained the principle that makes rockets fly but gave the essential sailing directions for space ships of the future. When a U.S. Atlas or an even bigger (for the present) Soviet space rocket roars into the sky. it runs on rails devised by the ill-tempered Sir Isaac, who sat in his English garden nearly 300 years...
...magic laws of Newton pointed clearly into the sky, no one apparently followed their lead until a shy, deaf, self-educated Russian schoolteacher, got to thinking about air travel in the 1890s. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, wrote about space flight with amazing prescience. He chose the rocket as the only possible space engine and derived mathematically the speed that its exhaust gases would have to attain. He decided that it should burn liquid fuel. This conclusion he published in 1898, when not even an airplane had left the ground...