Word: warheaded
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...space lag has its roots in the pre-Eisenhower era, beginning with the inability of President Harry Truman's scientific advisers, back in the mid-1940's to see any future in ballistic missiles. To carry a payload as big as a nuclear warhead, the scientists argued, a ballistic missile would have to be uneconomically bulky. So the U.S. channeled its missile efforts into now-obsolescent air-breathing missiles-Snark, Navaho, Regulus, etc.-that were inherently useless for space work. Meanwhile, the Russians were pushing ahead with ballistic missiles. By 1953, when a team of U.S. physicists headed...
...ones. Fluorescent lamps are full of glowing plasma. The newly discovered Van Allen radiation belt, which surrounds the earth and stands as a threat to space-voyaging man. is a thin but dangerous plasma. The fireballs of nuclear explosions are made of plasma; so are electric arcs. When the warhead of a missile slams back into the atmosphere, it heats the air around it to 18.000° and turns it into an electrically charged plasma...
...Chance in 200. What Gralla and his crew had come to shoot were three 57-ft. X-17A solid-propellant rockets, each tipped with a 1.5 kiloton atomic warhead (equivalent in blast to 1,500 tons of TNT). Since he had no target to hit except the wide sky, Gralla's job might have seemed simple, but in fact it was fantastically difficult. To enable the rockets to travel 300 miles up, he had to get them fired in an almost perfectly vertical course, a delicate task in rough seas. The rockets had to go off at precisely...
...space expert, "is their early start." The U.S.S.R. began working on long-range ballistic missiles soon after World War II. The U.S. did not push ballistic-missile development until 1954, after U.S. physicists decided that they could do what they had said was impossible: make a nuclear warhead light enough to be carried in the nose of a missile...
...militarily speaking, superior to the U.S.S.R.'s. The Russian rocket that carried the Lunik into orbit produced a lot more thrust than any U.S. missile, but if the military job of a ballistic missile is to travel accurately from one point on the globe to another with a warhead in its nose, U.S. missiles appear fit to do the job at least as well as their bulkier Russian counterparts...