Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wernher von Braun and his rocket team, the world's most experienced, were specifically ordered to forget about satellite work. They did no such thing, and neither did their U.S. Army bosses. The Von Braun team had been authorized to develop the Army's Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile as a competitor of the Air Force's Thor-and Von Braun said he needed test vehicles to iron out some of the problems. He wangled permission to build twelve Jupiter-Cs-actually, almost the same jazzed-up Redstones with which he had proposed to put a small...
...better than for him to toss up the first U.S. satellite. Such men as Lieut. General James Gavin, the brainy chief of Research and Development, and Major General John Medaris, the able military commander at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, saw in a successful moon, and its proof of rocket superiority, a way for the Army to break out of its post-Korea roles-and-missions bog-down. But the orders giving Vanguard its exclusive franchise on space were clear and firm, and the Army could not risk defying them...
...ahead from McElroy, the U.S. Explorer streaked into space. And last week Wernher von Braun, who sweated out the shoot in Washington (TIME, Feb. 10), returned to his white frame house on Huntsville's "Sauerkraut Hill"-and to the brightest new day that his Army-run German rocket team had faced in more than 20 years...
...with housing developments, more than a dozen modern motels, a $3,000,000 shopping plaza (with a delicatessen featuring Wiener schnitzel), and two new schools. A pride of the community is the new 55-piece Huntsville Civic Orchestra-with Werner Kuers, one of Von Braun's old German rocket hands, as concertmaster...
...means that unless a spaceship is braked in some way, it will hit the moon's surface at 5,000 m.p.h. Since the moon has no appreciable atmosphere that can be used for braking, the ship will have to cushion its fall by burning precious fuel in its rocket engine. To take off from the moon will cost fuel too, about one-sixth as much as was needed to escape from the earth. So an earth-to-moon spaceship will have to carry a very large payload of fuel if its crew hopes to get home again...