Word: rockets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Guided missiles powered by rocket motors are not new. Their military importance has been obvious since the German V-25, speeding many times as fast as the sound of their coming, hit London in 1944. If they had carried atomic warheads, they would have reduced much of England to radioactive rubble. No military nation missed this chilling lesson. War had taken on a new dimension; even before the first atomic bomb, it took little imagination to picture dozens of deadly duties that missiles could perform...
Technological Revolution. Effective missiles call for a technology that did not then exist. The need was for better rocket motors, more sophisticated electronics, more intelligent computers, more sensitive instruments. The demand was for new metals, ceramics, fuels, new physics and mathematics. New production methods were called for-in short, a technological revolution...
This revolution has now happened. In the past ten years the world of electronics has evolved beyond recognition. Computers, the brains of the missiles, have grown in intelligence as fast as the magic unfolding of a child's mind. Rocket motors are lighter, more dependable, enormously more powerful...
...systems are of obvious value for an ICBM, and both are being developed. One, under contracts with American Bosch Arma, AC Spark Plug and M.I.T., is "inertial guidance." Its heart is a subtle instrument that senses every force that acts on the flying missile, the enormous force of the rocket thrust and the delicate forces of crosswinds and yawing motions. This information goes to a computer (contracts with Burroughs and Sperry Rand) that figures out the missile's position, speed and direction. If any one of these is not right for the programmed trajectory, the computer makes corrections, moving...
Both systems must exert their influence while the missile is still in the atmosphere or the motor is still thrusting. In space, with the rocket cold, a ballistic missile is as independent as an asteroid. But another guidance problem remains. The missile ascends toward space nose up and cruises toward its target around the curve of the earth. Thus, in natural flight it will re-enter the atmosphere more or less broadside on. This is undesirable; so a "positioning device" must be provided to turn its nose toward its target. There are several possible ways of doing this, such...