Word: vanguarde
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...symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light that slashed across the world's night skies and a Vanguard rocket toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach...
With the Sputniks, Russia took man into a new era of space, and with its advances in the art of missilery, posed the U.S. with the most dramatic military threat it had ever faced. And with the Vanguard's witlessly ballyhooed crash at Cape Canaveral went the U.S.'s long-held tenet that anything Communism's driven men could do, free men could do better. Whatever the future might bring, in 1957 the U.S. had been challenged and bested in the very area of technological achievement that had made it the world's greatest power...
...celebrated misfire of the Vanguard satellite (TIME, Dec. 16) falls into the category of battles that were lost for want of a nail. Studying films and performance data, technicians have traced Vanguard's failure to a leak sprung in a fuel line. The leak produced two quick effects: 1) because an improper ratio of fuel was being pumped into the thrust chamber, the missile lost thrust; 2) escaping fuel spurting against the hot pump assembly caught fire, turned Vanguard into a grounded inferno when the fire backlashed to the fuel tanks. Total cost of the malfunctioning part that punctured...
...adjustments in their plans. But if the Smithsonian's finding checks out, the perigee (minimum orbital altitude) for a long-lived satellite will have to be raised from 140 miles to 180 miles because of the decelerating drag of air particles at the lower altitude. Anticipated perigee for Vanguard: a safe 200 miles. Scientists at Washington's Carnegie Institution are still puzzling over a radio phenomenon of Sputnik I: a "ghost" signal that registered on their receivers when the artificial satellite was on the opposite side of the earth. One guess: under certain ionospheric conditions, the radio waves...
ENGLISH ECCENTRICS (376 pp.)-Dome Edith Sitwell-Vanguard...