Word: rocketted
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Adams climbed into its cockpit last week for his seventh flight. His craft was carrying instruments to collect micrometeorites, determine which of the sun's rays are absorbed by the atmosphere, and test an experimental coating for a Saturn rocket booster. It was the X-15's 191st flight since the U.S. first used it to explore the fringes of space in 1959 and, by the exacting standards of the men who fly the X-15, it was a routine mission...
Coming Downhill. In the bright sky over California's Mojave Desert, Adams unhooked from the B-52 mother ship that had carried him aloft to 45,000 ft. Then his ammonia and liquid-oxygen rocket motor ignited with 60,000 lbs. of thrust, hurtling him skyward for 80 sec. until his fuel burned out. Seconds before he glided upward to "go over the top" at his peak altitude of 261,000 ft., Adams radioed calmly to report loss of control of the X-15's pitch-and-roll dampers, twelve small rocket nozzles that guide the craft...
Somewhere close to 100,000 ft., when the X-15 met the earth's atmosphere at five times the speed of sound, National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists suspect, the plummeting rocket ship was buffeted violently by the thickening air, sending the craft into a series of shuddering gyrations that ripped off the X-15's wings and tail assembly, leaving Adams with no control and whirling him into senselessness within seconds. The forces may have gone higher than ten times the force of gravity, transforming Adams' 5-ft. 11-in. and 180-lb. frame into...
...signal from earth it fired its three vernier engines, rose ten feet from the surface and then landed again, eight feet from its original site. It was the first rocket-powered takeoff from the face of the moon...
...honest on my job application," he says. "I just put down that I was a laicized priest, and that sent them to their dictionary." Still others end up in less likely pursuits. A California cleric has become a chiropractor. One Biblical scholar now works for a company that makes rocket components...