Word: vapor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...could work wonders with lunar rock. The furnaces could melt lunar gravel and soil, which could be cast into bricks for building shelters. They could also be used to heat moon rocks enough to release their locked-in water. Even the proverbial pig's squeal could be used. Water vapor steaming out of the heated rocks could drive power turbines before being condensed into drinking water. When lunar water is finally available in ample supply, it could even be used for rocket fuel. Moon technicians will decompose it into hydrogen and oxygen gases by electrolysis, then feed the gases into...
...recent months, the nature of the arcane arsenal's components has gradually been revealed. In the chemical-warfare category, one of the most lethal gases is Sarin (GB), which in heavy vapor doses attacks the victim's nervous system and reduces him to a convulsive mass before death occurs. Fifteen years ago, the commanding officer of the Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal estimated that a single drop of the nerve gas in liquid form on the back of a man's hand could kill him in 30 seconds. Sarin has been improved since then. The Army...
...guests, I wandered with about fifty women through her exhibit, a collection of whirring, flashing, rotating constructions made of glass, wood, water, and light. One construction consisted of two panes of glass pressed against each other and suspended from the ceiling. From one corner between the glass panes, water vapor seeped continuously upward in lacy bubbles. A light cast on the wall a shadow of the moving vapor lacework. The shadow looked like a spider web, growing, disappearing, and continually replacing itself...
...external-combustion motor (which burns fuel outside the cylinders), uses yards of coiled tubing instead of an old-fashioned steam boiler and a special chemical preparation (to prevent freezing) instead of water. The fluid is sealed in, so it can't boil away. It is superheated to vapor by a burner that, according to Lear, "can burn anything from ground camel dung to high-grade gasoline"-although he recommends kerosene...
After the spectrograms were developed, Schorn saw what he had been looking for. "There was the water-pow!" he says. The dark absorption lines, which stood out "as bold as fence posts," revealed that all the water vapor in the Martian atmosphere equals about a cubic mile of water, less than in a large lake on earth. Spread over the planet's surface, it would be only a thousandth of an inch deep. There was about twice as much water vapor in the Northern Hemisphere (where it is now late summer) than in the southern half (where...