Word: thors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...quietest and perhaps most meaningful news was that the Air Force was getting ready this week to fire an intermediate range Thor from a brand-new base perched on a jagged coastal saucer 168 miles northwest of Los Angeles-Strategic Air Command's Vandenberg Air Force Base. The West Coast missile complex is designed to take up where Cape Canaveral leaves off; i.e., primarily to shoot operational missiles and train crews to handle them. One Western advantage : satellites can be flung thence into polar orbits (see diagram) without hazard to populated areas...
...Army's Camp Cooke. Tattered bayonet targets, reminders of pre-pushbutton war, stand in a quiet tract, while 3,900 civilians and 3,500 airmen work busily around a futuristic maze: three 135-ft. Atlas gantries on nearly completed pads, three more Atlas pads still being poured, eight Thor pads, 8,000-ft. bases for electronic tracking, a hangar-shaped missile-assembly building and a convenient liquid oxygen (LOX) factory...
...Force announced last week that it is canceling its air-to-ground missile Rascal, now surpassed by the longer-range Hound Dog. Due soon, on orders from the President, is an appallingly long-delayed decision between the rival liquid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missiles, the Air Force's Thor and the Army's Jupiter. Last week's splendid 6,300-mile performance by Atlas may also firm a tentative decision to slow down on or drop the Air Force's alternative intercontinental ballistic missile Titan. Also to be cut back or discarded: the Navy...
...billion defense budget that the real cuts must be made if the Administration is to approach its budget goals. To that end. President Eisenhower has ordered that a decision, delayed for many months, be made at last between the Air Force IRBM Thor and its Army rival Jupiter...
...trouble came in the first stage, a military Thor rocket whose gyroscopic guidance system misfunctioned just enough to make the trajectory 3.5° steeper than it should have been. This steepness reduced the advantage that was obtained from the slingshot effect of the earth's eastward rotation. Air Force experts say that a loss of speed less than 600 m.p.h. was enough to make the probe fall far short of the moon's orbit...