Word: skies
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...like to talk about is the poverty. They show visitors the new housing project across the river from Ciudad Trujillo, but it is very small potatoes compared with the slums that make up the bulk of the city. The hovels are all freshly painted, generally an ocher or a sky blue or sea green, with a barn-red trim framing the doors and windows. That's the way El Benefactor wants it, and everybody paints once or twice a year. But the houses themselves are miserable one-or two-room shacks, so old and termite-riddled that they list...
Over Chicago a bright blue light hangs in the sky, visible 400 miles away. When dawn comes the light jades out in the sunshine, and the sky station stands revealed. It is a great, saucerlike disk supported in the high, thin air by whirling helicopter blades. On its deck perch radar antennas, turning ceaselessly. It stays up month after month. It has no fuel to be exhausted; its power is beamed to it from the ground...
Conferring with helicopter people, Raytheon's scientists concluded that a sky station will have to leave the earth under ordinary chemical power and buzz its way up to the spot where the power beams come to a focus. Then its microwave-fueled engine will take over. Test prototypes will carry a human crew, but later models will be automatic. Once they have been maneuvered into the focal spot, they will be kept there by electronic devices which sense when they are beginning to drift out of it. If the supporting beam fails, the station will drift down gently, supported...
Though Raytheon has not put even a model sky station into the air so far, the Air Force is already discussing a preliminary contract. Sky stations could support search radars to watch for aircraft around the curve of the earth. A chain of them acting as microwave repeaters could carry TV programs and telephone conversations across continents and oceans. Fitted with big glass bulbs filled with neon or xenon gas, which glows red or blue when microwaves pass through it, they could serve as stratospheric lighthouses to guide aircraft flying above the clouds...
...waters of Florida's Everglades, wake to the spontaneous burst of sound and color of the Mangrove Coast, where thousands of roosting ibis, egrets, anhingas and spoonbills toy, and where silver tarpon jump by moonlight and coons and otters feed and play. They fish under the dawn-pink sky out of San Diego, and in the cool basins of the Colorado mountains. And they can just laze...