Word: skies
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...between two bureaucratic domains: the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency and the civilian-bossed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (see chart). On paper the division is clear and logical: ARPA, headed by sometime General Electric Executive Roy Johnson, oversees military projects (the Discoverer eye-in-the-sky program, a 1,000,000-lb.-thrust multi-chamber rocket engine); NASA, under Engineer T. Keith Glennan, oversees civilian projects (Project Mercury, a 1,000,000-lb.-thrust single-chamber engine). But the division is arbitrary, a response to prejudices and rivalries rather than to the realities of the challenge...
...Isaac Newton's laws of motion, published in 1687, not only explained the principle that makes rockets fly but gave the essential sailing directions for space ships of the future. When a U.S. Atlas or an even bigger (for the present) Soviet space rocket roars into the sky. it runs on rails devised by the ill-tempered Sir Isaac, who sat in his English garden nearly 300 years ago and wondered why things move as they do, and why things fall. When a rocket engine shoots a jet of gas out of its tail cone, Newton's third...
Although the magic laws of Newton pointed clearly into the sky, no one apparently followed their lead until a shy, deaf, self-educated Russian schoolteacher, got to thinking about air travel in the 1890s. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, wrote about space flight with amazing prescience. He chose the rocket as the only possible space engine and derived mathematically the speed that its exhaust gases would have to attain. He decided that it should burn liquid fuel. This conclusion he published in 1898, when not even an airplane had left the ground...
...scientists do not agree. Nor do they think much of the idea of armed satellite bases. They see little reason to shoot from a satellite when a rocket shot from solid ground can hit any target on earth. But satellites may prove to have value as "eyes in the sky" over enemy territory...
...cancellation by the Air Force also ends Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp.'s contract for the J83 jet engine. Cutback will reduce Fairchild's sales by about $56 million in 1959, cause layoffs of 2,000 employees. Said Fairchild President James H. Carmichael: "The company has a rough sky ahead...