Word: skies
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After weeks of agonizing difficulties, the U.S. had a big week in missilery. On Johnston Island, 700 miles southwest of Hawaii, one morning the sky blossomed red when the Army's reliable Redstone took a nuclear warhead up an estimated 100 miles and exploded it in the thin air on space's edge-a high-altitude test, say intelligence reports, that came ten months behind a similar U.S.S.R. shot in the crucial race for the anti-bomber and antimissile missile (see SCIENCE). Next day Air Force missilemen at Cape Canaveral, Fla. sent their mightiest beast...
...strike. He saw the big show coming, and by Pearl Harbor, bossed an air force of trained American volunteers, which never numbered more than 55 flyable P-40s and 80 pilots. For $600 a month and $500 a kill, his Flying Tigers knocked the Zeros out of the sky. "Make 'em play your way," he said, and his pilots...
...after Pearl Harbor, the Tigers racked up 284 kills and 300 probables, in exchange for twelve pilots, two crew chiefs and 21 planes. He rewrote the book of aerial combat, insisting on two-plane teams, dropping the first fire bombs on the inflammable architecture of the East, coaching his sky raiders to dive, squirt, pass and run. He lived on rice and red ants, coffee and cigarettes; he dwelt in mud and bamboo; he dressed in shorts and a billed, battered, nondescript cap. "Old Leatherface,'' the Chinese fondly called him, and guarded his precious store of gasoline...
...Richard Wagner, the shimmering strains of Lohengrin's "Prelude" suggested a clear image: "Out of the clear blue ether of the sky there seems to condense a wonderful . . . vision; and out of this there gradually emerges ... an angel host bearing in its midst the Holy Grail ... It pours out exquisite odors, like streams of gold." The opening scene of Wieland's production duly provided a blinding cobalt blue sky against which was ranged a semicircle of knights in dazzling silver mail. The oak tree where King Heinrich holds court was reduced to a circular cluster of painted branches...
Well on its way toward operational perfection, the Army's IRBM Jupiter was shot off last week from the Cape, lunged hundreds of miles into the sky and 1,500 miles downrange; two hours later its nose cone was dipped out of the sea intact. It was the third nose cone to be retrieved, and, reported Army missilemen happily, it proved that the critical problem of warhead re-entry into the earth's atmosphere had been solved...