Word: rockets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...open, roasted stretches of the Western scrub, the fiercely private Goddard thrived. Over the next nine years, his Nells grew from 12 ft. to 16 ft. to 18 ft., and their altitude climbed from 2,000 ft. to 7,500 ft. to 9,000 ft. He built a rocket that exceeded the speed of sound and another with fin-stabilized steering, and he filed dozens of patents for everything from gyroscopic guidance systems to multistage rockets...
...said to have responded, "Why don't you ask your own Dr. Goddard? He knows better than any of us." When some V-2s finally made their way to the U.S. and Goddard had a chance to autopsy one, he instantly recognized his own handiwork. "Isn't this your rocket?" an assistant asked as they poked around its innards. "It seems to be," Goddard replied flatly...
Goddard accepted paternity of his bastard V-2, and that, as it turned out, was the last rocket he fathered while alive. In 1945 he was found to have throat cancer, and before the year was out, he was dead. His technological spawn, however, did not stop. American scientists worked alongside emigre German scientists to incorporate Goddard's innovations into the V-2, turning the killer missile into the Redstone, which put the first Americans into space. The Redstone led directly to the Saturn moon rockets, and indirectly to virtually every other rocket the U.S. has ever flown...
...landing, the New York Times took a bemused backward glance at a tart little editorial it had published 49 years before. "Further investigation and experimentation," said the paper in 1969, "have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error." The grim Professor Goddard might not have appreciated the humor, but he would almost certainly have accepted the apology...
...writers of his generation were down at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory cheering on the moon landings, Ballard was in a London art gallery throwing a Pop Art happening with a crashed car and a topless model. Ballard's approach to the future was never rooted in engineering, physics or rocket science but rather in medicine, psychology and Surrealism. Time has been kind...