Word: tunneling
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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...
...rate, their tunnel doorways drifted over with sand-leaving after perhaps 5,000 years an almost perfect subject for archaeological study. Beside the ash-filled fireplaces stood bowls and cups. Tools were neatly stacked. Last offerings to the gods were laid out on the floors, and storage bins held enough grain to feed the inhabitants who never came home...
Terror's Strength. Last week 18-year-old Fannie Robbins and four other women were working at a drying tunnel in the Defense Plant's "B" Building Annex. Part of an order of 12 million M-80 firecrackers, used by the Army to condition troops to noise, had taken on moisture and had to be warmed by the tunnel's fluorescent light. Fannie was putting firecrackers in the tunnel. Suddenly there was a "great big flash of light." Bits of glass flew into Fannie's eyes, but she managed to grope...