Word: sphere
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...lived up to his billing. "We Afrikaners," he thundered, "believe that God put us on the southern tip of the African continent to establish, build and maintain white civilization. We must destroy any move toward bastardization. For this reason the government has introduced apartheid [racial segregation] into every possible sphere." At the opposition United Party, which draws its support largely from South Africa's 1,200,000 citizens of British descent, Strijdom leveled a deadly charge: "They are imperialists more concerned with British interests and prestige than South Africa's. Our aim is to make South Africa...
Vanguard I might seem too small (diameter: 6.4 in.; weight: 3.25 Ibs.) to carry much cargo, but an amazing amount of delicate apparatus was packed into it. Most novel items: its six solar batteries made of subtly treated silicon that look out through windows distributed over the sphere in such a way that at least one of them is always facing the sun. Each battery develops about 25 milliwatts of power when in sunlight, and feeds a miniature transmitter that broadcasts continuously on 108.03 megacycles. Another transmitter, powered by a mercury battery, broadcasts on 108 megacycles...
Besides being useful for tracking the tiny sphere by radio, the transmitters report the temperature inside it. The surface of the sphere is made of shiny aluminum covered with a thin coat of silicon monoxide. This material is transparent to visible light from the sun, which it permits the polished aluminum to reflect back into space. But it looks black to the long infra-red (heat) waves. Since black surfaces radiate well, it permits the satellite to get rid of its internal heat by radiation. The system seems to be working well. Both transmitters have reported that the temperature inside...
...Navy electronic experts want to predict officially how long the solar batteries will keep supplying power. One of them guesses unofficially that "our grandchildren may hear its signals." Eventually the windows in the skin of the sphere will be clouded by the sandblasting of micro-meteorites. No one knows how long this will take, or how much it will affect the action of the batteries...
...Holloman, that is almost as flat as a frozen lake. While figuring theoretically how to lay out the 35,080-ft. track, they considered making it perfectly straight both up-and-down and sideways, but gave this up because the curvature of the earth (the earth considered as a sphere with a 4,000-mile radius) would require either a cut in the ground 35 ft. deep at the midsection of the track, or 35-ft. embankments at the ends. So the engineers compromised with nature by making their track a series of sections slightly less humpbacked than the earth...