Word: speeding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...navigation is the ease of longdistance travel after successful launching. Mars never comes closer to the earth than 34.5 million miles, Venus never closer than 25 million miles. To cover these great distances, it takes more time (146 days to Venus, 260 days to Mars), but only slightly more speed than is needed to go to the moon, which is only 230,000 miles away. This is because space between the planets is comparatively smooth. It is only slightly affected by planetary gravitation, and the great pull of the sun is countered by the orbital speed that a spaceship inherits...
...Escape. Full escape from the gravitational pull of the sun would be tougher. Starting from the earth's surface, a ship would need 36,800 m.p.h. Soaring past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, it would reach the outer limits of the solar system with almost no speed left. Then, like a chip on a glassy lake, it could drift for millions of years before it approached the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 25 trillion miles away from the sun. Man's spaceships can probably reach interstellar escape velocity in a generation, but there will...
...close is interplanetary voyaging? The great weight (2,925 lbs. of instrumented payload) of Sputnik III proved to the space-wise that the Russians had practically licked the initial problems of interplanetary flight. U.S. scientists reckon that the Soviets' Lunik, with only a little more speed, would have swooped past Mars and soared out toward the asteroids. George Paul Sutton, professor of aeronautical engineering at M.I.T., believes that present propulsion systems with a little refinement can send a space vehicle as far as Jupiter or even to Saturn, 750 million miles from the earth...
Crunchy Snow. After this climactic event Astronomer Kuiper thinks the moon led an increasingly peaceful life. It picked up the rest of the small satellites, which made the fresh-looking pits on its surface. Cosmic rays and other high-speed particles bombarded its surface, riddling the material with microscopic holes. This beaten-up stuff is only an inch or so thick, says Kuiper, and it is not dust. He thinks it would feel underfoot "like crunchy snow...
...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...