Word: space
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Word in Space. For the moment, most scientists are concentrating on sending not man but "black boxes" into space. Humans are too heavy, bulky, ineffective and delicate to pay their way in the space vehicles of the near future. Instruments will do much better with far less demand for accommodation. Best of all, the black boxes need not get home alive. If they have radioed their findings back to earth, they can vaporize in a planet's atmosphere or wander into space never to return...
...Kuiper believes that the moon's surface is blazing with radioactivity. On the earth, he says, the thick layer of air is the shielding equivalent of 3 ft. of lead or 33 ft. of water, protects the surface from many kinds of tough radiation beating down from space. Kuiper believes that the moon is radioactively contaminated to a depth of 30 ft. below the surface...
...simplest kind of instrumented space probe can gather much valuable information without landing on the moon or a planet. A picture of the back of the moon is one of the easiest prizes. Interplanetary space is by no means empty. It contains a very thin gas of unknown composition, and through it a "wind" of high-speed particles blows outward from the sun. This wind may be dangerous; it should be studied carefully before manned ships are launched deeply into space...
...space art improves, instrumented vehicles will make soft landings on the moon, braked gently to the airless surface by retrorockets. Once they get there, they can look around with television eyes, telling the earth what they see. When the probes get good enough to tackle the planets, they can swoop into the atmosphere of Venus for a look at its unknown surface, swing around Mars looking for signs of life...
...unsolved problem is communication. It will do no good to send a space probe to Mars if communication with it is lost, as happened to Lunik soon after it passed the moon. Radio signals can cover any desired distance if given sufficient power, but the only power sources now available are heavy, short-lived chemical batteries or feeble solar batteries. To tell its story properly from the distance of Mars, a probe needs as much power as an earth-side radio station. One possibility is a nuclear battery getting its energy from radioactive materials. Another (one form of which...