Word: titanic
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...Gemini two-men-in-space program, already nine months behind schedule, got off the ground last week. A Martin Marietta Titan II rode from Cape Kennedy trailing orange smoke from its two engines, an unmanned dummy capsule fitted into its nose. The first stage burned for 21 minutes, then the second stage ignited and accelerated to orbital speed. In six minutes the word came back from the tracking system: Gemini was in orbit with a perigee of 99.6 miles and an apogee of 204 miles, almost exactly as planned...
...delay-free smoothness of the launch was largely because Titan II, a practical, dependable military rocket, does not use troublesome liquid oxygen. Instead it burns storable liquid fuels (a mixture of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine with nitrogen tetroxide as oxidizer) that are "hyper-golic," ignited spontaneously on contact. It is much more powerful than the Atlas that launched the manned Mercury capsules, having 430,000 Ibs. of thrust at takeoff instead of 360,000, and 100,000 Ibs. of thrust in its second stage. The dummy Gemini capsule, weighted with ballast and instruments, was more than twice as heavy...
...Atlas, Titan and Polaris are nearly all paid up. Atlas is already being phased out; 27 of the hard-to-handle liquid-fueled missiles are scheduled to be removed from "soft" surface sites at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, Wyoming's Warren A.F.B. and Nebraska's Offutt A.F.B. by mid-1965. New-missile procurement is limited to 50 advanced Minuteman II missiles, capable, with their 9,000-mile range, of hitting Red Chinese targets from sites on the West Coast. Another 950 Minutemen will be in hardened under ground emplacements...
Kiddie Cars if Necessary. In early U.S. tests, recalls an Air Force general, liquid-fueled Atlas missiles "were blowing up like tin cans." But later improvements have raised the success average to about 70% . Of 199 Atlas firings, 137 have been successful. For liquid-fueled Titan I, the score reported by the Air Force is 47 successes, ten partial successes, seven failures. For Titan II, just becoming operational: 19 successes, seven partial successes, one failure. For the solid-fueled, Minuteman: 45 successes, eleven partial successes, nine failures...
...TITAN II: Range over 9,000 miles...