Word: tunnelers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wilds of northern British Colum bia last week, the touring Duke of Edinburgh was taken inside a 7,000-ft. mountain where a powerhouse bigger than a cathedral had been blasted out of the solid granite. Water from glacial lakes poured down through a ten-mile tunnel to turn the turbines and set in motion the vast Kitimat project built by the Aluminum Co. of Canada. "Does it work?" shouted the duke above the machines' roar. Said a proud Alcan engineer: "You bet it does...
Missile and space flight enthusiasts talk calmly about speeds above 10,000 m.p.h. Anyone who thinks that it will be easy to fly at such speeds has only to visit the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory at Buffalo, N.Y. and watch the tests being run in its hypersonic wind tunnel...
...hypersonic tunnel is a vacuum chamber at one end and a gas-charged cannon at the other. At the beginning of each test, a strong-walled tube six feet long and three inches in diameter is charged at high pressure with an explosive mixture of hydrogen, oxygen and helium. When the gas is detonated (with a bang like a 37 mm. gun), it ruptures a copper diaphragm. A blast of hot gases preceded by a shockwave races down a long evacuated tube. Pushed by pressure behind and pulled by the vacuum ahead, it expands through two nozzles...
Cornell uses the hypersonic tunnel to find out what will happen to a guided missile that enters the atmosphere from space at many times the speed of sound. Even if it flies perfectly straight, it gets a rugged workout, with luminous gas racing around it hot enough to melt or vaporize any known substance. If it enters sideways with a yawing motion, as is more likely, the heating effect is much greater. A steel ball or a sharp-edge wedge turns into an artificial meteor...
Cornell's tunnel is an experimental model. A much larger one copied from it will be built at the Air Force's Arnold Engineering Development Center at Tullahoma, Tenn. Details of construction are secret, but the objective is not: to learn to make missiles behave like meteors, yet survive unmelted to complete their missions...