Word: speeding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...clear, calm night at Cape Canaveral. The Army, making its first attempt to shoot the moon, had spent weeks fussing over the Juno II, a 60-ton Jupiter IRBM with a spike of high-speed rockets mounted on its nose. At twelve seconds after 12:45 a.m., almost exactly on schedule, Juno II took off. It climbed loudly but smoothly, arching slightly north of east. For about three minutes the first-stage rocket burned brightly, diminishing slowly with distance. Then its power shut off, and the upper stages coasted flameless for 55 seconds. About 110 miles up and 160 miles...
...rejiggered valve did not work quite right. Either the kerosene or lox was used up too fast, and the flame went out 3.7 seconds sooner than it should have. The toolow boost of the first stage (plus a small aiming error) kept Pioneer III from reaching its intended speed...
Pioneer III was designed to attain a top speed of 24,486 m.p.h. This would have been enough to toss it free of the earth's gravitation and make it a satellite (or burned-up victim) of the sun. The actual speed attained, 23,606 m.p.h., was only enough to carry the gold cone 66,654 miles from the earth. It reached its high point in 20 hours of travel. Then it fell back. Gathering speed again in its long fall, it hit the earth about 20 hours later in a brief streak of flame in the night...
Osborne's mental stature also keeps him from the necessity of wholesale borrowing of stock characters and themes from other playwrights. American dramatists, by contrast, tend to be astonishingly inbred: Tennessee Williams produces William Inge; Inge mates with his parent to produce a frail and sickly creature like, say, Speed Lamkin, who can also show O'Neill and Miller and Heaven knows who-all in his family tree...
...high point, about 9 p.m. EST Saturday night, it had slowed to a few hundred miles per hour. But once arced downward, its speed revved to an estimated 23,300 m.p.h. as it dived on the jungles of north-central Africa...