Word: rockets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Prussian Baron Magnus von Braun, is director of the development operations division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala., stands out as the inspirational as well as the scientific leader of the Men of Jupiter. At 18 Von Braun was working with crude liquid-fuel rockets, using Berlin's municipal dump; one day a black sedan stopped. Three German army officers stepped out, offered Von Braun military facilities to carry on his rocket work. At 20 he was chief of the entire German rocket program; at 32, working in the Nazi rocket center at Peenem...
...launching vehicle that put it there was a special, four-stage version of the Army's test rocket, the Jupiter-C. Its first stage, which contributed most of the push into space, was the familiar, well-tested Redstone, fitted for the occasion with slightly longer fuel tanks, and burning a hydrazine-based, exotic fuel called Hydyne, which gave more thrust than its motor's usual diet of alcohol. Stuck on its nose was an awkward-looking, cylindrical "bucket" mounted on a bearing so that it could be spun, and containing a cluster of 14 small, solid-fuel rockets...
...firing time approached, the bucket, driven by a small electric motor, began to rotate. This motion had the same purpose as the spin of a rifle bullet: to "spin-stabilize" the upper stages of the rocket. It would also check any tendency to veer off course if any of the small rockets in the bucket should ignite later than the others, or burn erratically...
Bird at Peak. When ready for firing, the whole assembly weighed 65,000 lbs., so the 83,000-lb. thrust of the first-stage rocket motor lifted it off the ground at a fairly fast clip. The first stage burned for 150 seconds. When its fuel was gone, about 60 miles above the earth, most of the Redstone dropped away, leaving only a short section of the nose attached to the spinning bucket. As it zoomed upward at several thousand miles per hour, a gyroscopically controlled device turned the missile's attitude toward the horizontal by blowing jets...
...while, it was being tracked from the ground in four different electronic ways, and Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, German-born rocket expert, was waiting for a complicated instrumental setup to tell him the exact time to ignite the second stage and "inject" the satellite into its orbit. When the shortened assembly reached about 200 miles altitude and was pointing in the right direction, he pressed a button...