Word: thors
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This month, when the Air Force's Atlas sped 2,500 miles over the Atlantic, pictures of its virtually blunt nose seemed strange to the streamline-minded. But current Atlas and Thor noses are likely to stay blunt for good reason. Developed by General Electric, they are made mainly of heavy copper, which helpfully spreads and diffuses the heat. But the main design trick is to keep the nose from ever getting too hot. The bluntness creates a shielding shock wave out front that cuts the velocity of the air actually hitting the nose to subsonic speed, then slows...
Despite its proneness to bluntness, the Air Force last month successfully fired a Thor-Able missile with a faster-flying new nose of the type developed by the Army on its Jupiter IRBM. This one is more classically sharp. Instead of absorbing and avoiding heat, it removes heat by "ablation." Technique: coating the nose surface with materials that melt or vaporize while absorbing heat, yet leave the material underneath cool and undamaged. The best materials seem to be polymer plastics, mixed with fibers of glass...
...pioneer probe vehicle weighs about 60 Ibs., is shaped like a doughnut with a sausage through its middle. If all goes well at the Cape Canaveral launching pad, a three-stage Thor-Able rocket will shoot the probe into space at an initial speed of 23,827 m.p.h. After the third-stage rocket drops off at 200 miles beyond earth, the probe, still pulled by earth, will gradually slow down as it flies for almost three days...
...Sputniks, U.S. experts have surmised that the Russians may have a massive, single-chamber rocket engine for which the U.S. has no match. The U.S.'s most powerful engine develops only 150,000 Ibs. of thrust, is made by Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation, Inc. for the Thor and Jupiter (the considerably larger Atlas uses a cluster of engines). Last week Rocketdyne was starting work on an Air Force contract for developing a monster engine with 1,000,000 Ibs. of thrust...
Developing a 1,000,000-lb. engine, says Rocketdyne, will take perhaps five years, but it will not require any new scientific breakthroughs. The present Thor engine, which is about as big as a small sports car, will be scaled up to about three times as big. New alloys (probably tungsten-molybdenum-nickel) will be needed for the walls of the thrust chamber, whose temperature will rise from 1,000°-1,200° range to the 1,800°-2,000° range. Combustion-chamber pressure will rise from the current 300-500-lb. range toward...