Word: venuses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...clouds." The Dutch press could hardly be accused of concealing the facts last week. Once again, Queen Juliana's weakness for the preternatural had landed her back in the headlines: she had invited to the palace a crackpot from California who numbered among his friends men from Mars, Venus and other solar-system suburbs. Both court and Cabinet pleaded, but the Queen would not be budged. "A hostess," said she in refusing to cancel the audience, "cannot slam the door in the face of her guests...
...Next: Venus. Like most other scientists, Van Allen is in no hurry to put a man into space. "A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now," he says. "He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working." Instruments are lighter, tougher and less demanding, are sensitive to many things that human senses ignore. They already have memories (tape recorders), and they can carry computers that will permit them to make judgments. An instrument-manned Venus probe should be able to make observations and adjust its course by firing...
Paddle Wheels for Power. Oddest-looking satellite yet is one scheduled for launching next month by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to test the possibility of sending a probe to the neighborhood of Venus. There is no point in such a probe unless radio communication can be maintained across 25 million miles, the nearest approach of Venus. Transmission over this distance requires a lot of power. Chemical batteries are too feeble. Nuclear-powered batteries are promising but have not been developed sufficiently. The best bet is solar cells, which capture energy from sunlight...
...first paddle-wheel satellite will not try for Venus, but will follow a long elliptical orbit that will take it about 30,000 miles from the earth. It will carry various instruments, but its principal job will be to answer promptly when spoken to. If all goes well, it will draw on its stored solar power and speak in a loud radio voice. Then its designers can judge whether a transmitter of this type can be made loud enough to be heard from Venus...
...Choreographer Béjart) was transformed by turns into a snarling tiger ("His loins," says the program, "are heavy with solitude"), an arm-flapping eagle, a scared rat ("His heart is full of holes, like a cheese"). In a later scene he encountered assorted characters, including Romeo and Venus, who stepped from a giant pearl shell in a flesh-colored leotard. At one point he joined Death in a game of cards, with Eurydice's midriff serving as table. The deafening last scene found Orpheus hanging by his heels from the flies...