Word: thiokol
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...Countdown. It all began in 1957 when the null people of Brigham City heard without much interest that an East Coast outfit with a peculiar name, Thiokol Chemical Corp., planned to build some sort of plant on a nearby desert. Few realized that the newcomer would turn their isolated, sheep-and-sugar-beet town into a booming center of U.S. rocketry. Today the rocket plant's employees number more than 3,000, flood Brigham City's roads with traffic and its schools with children. Ranch-style homes for engineers, chemists, physicists and mathematicians are spreading into the beet...
...Brigham City plant began as a research center and pilot plant for production of rocket engines filled with the rubbery solid fuel that was Thiokol's first contribution to rocketry. It has grown into 84 smallish structures scattered over miles of desert, but it still reflects the basic simplicity that is solid fuel's chief advantage over liquid. The liquid-fuel rocket engines that push the Thor and Atlas must be static-tested with their flames shooting downward, which requires massive, well-anchored test stands to resist the upward thrust. Their liquid fuel and oxidizer call for pumps...
...Cylinder. Thiokol's test stands are hardly more than nicks in the rocky hillsides. They need no elaborate structures or tubing because a solid-fuel booster is little more than a fat, blunt-nosed casing for the fuel it encloses. It lies on its side in a heavy steel cradle and pokes its enormous thrust against a vertical rock face sheathed with concrete. Instruments record vibrations, temperatures and the stress in its metal skin, but human watchers do not shelter in a blockhouse. They watch the tests from open hillsides. "Distance is cheaper," they say, "than concrete and periscopes...
Like all big missiles, Minuteman is an assembly job, using components from many sources. Besides making the heavy first-stage booster, Thiokol may also get the contract for the second-stage booster. The third stage, which has yet to reach final design, will probably be made by Hercules Powder Co. at Bacchus, 15 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The guidance system, made by North American Aviation, Inc. (it recently got a $115 million contract), will be shipped in from California. Boeing Airplane Co. will put together the three stages and install the guidance system in the completed missile...
...combustion. They hit upon a polysulfide-a rubbery, sticky liquid that could be poured, solidified, then burned at a controllable rate. It worked, and is now the basis for the Navy's Polaris and all other solid-fuel U.S. rockets. The small company that made it, Thiokol, has become one of the leaders of the new space industry. J.P.L. does not mind; once something developed at the laboratory works satisfactorily, J.P.L. passes on to other things...