Word: zeros
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only the week before, the Navy had babied its slender satellite-laden Vanguard. Day after day the tension on the Cape had tightened as the Vanguard countdown crept steadily toward zero: once within nine minutes of launching, once again within 4½ minutes, again to 22 seconds-even to a hairbreadth 14 seconds. Each time the launching was scrubbed. And at length, the red-eyed, nerve-racked Navymen found a small propellant leak in the rocket's second stage. It was during the Vanguard trials that the Army moved its shrouded bird from a hangar to its launching...
Spinning Bucket. The Pentagon teletype clacked: WHEN THE COUNTDOWN REACHES ZERO, THE BIRD WILL NOT BEGIN TO RISE IMMEDIATELY SO DON'T BE WORRIED IF WE DON'T TELL YOU IT'S ON THE WAY . . . THE SEARCHLIGHTS ARE GOING ON AND LIGHTING UP THE VEHICLE. IT IS A BEAUTIFUL SIGHT. Meanwhile at the White House, Presidential Aide Andy Goodpaster relayed the countdown, received over a Pentagon line, to Press Secretary James Hagerty in Augusta. From Central Control at 10:33 the calm voice on the mike droned on: "T minus 15 and still counting...
...three, four minutes passed. In the Pentagon, Wilber Brucker, sometime governor of Michigan, cracked lamely: "This is like waiting for precinct returns .to come in." Von Braun and Pickering sat down and scribbled some figures. At zero plus in minutes, three California stations reported the pickup. Pickering said: "I want four stations. These are all Army stations, and they may be over enthusiastic." The fourth followed: a Navy tracking station checked in with the confirming news. Announced Pickering: "It's in orbit." Brucker beamed; Von Braun smiled. The Explorer was late, he concluded, because it had shot farther...
Three Doughnuts. Britain's ZETA (Zero-Energy Thermonuclear Assembly), which was shown last week by Sir John Cockcroft at Harwell atomic laboratory, looks like three 10-ft. doughnuts laced together like links of a chain. The central horizontal torus (scientific word for a doughnut shape) is a ring-shaped aluminum vacuum chamber with a 39-in. bore. The two vertical doughnuts linked into it are the iron cores of a transformer. When a small amount of deuterium gas is fed into the evacuated torus and a heavy electric current is shot through the transformer, an even heavier current (this...
...Zero Hour. The Lumbees were restless because the Klan had burned two crosses as warnings to Indians to keep their place. (Backward Robeson County has three-way segregation in schools.) Despite the gentle protests of their elders, and of community officials around the county, many of the Lumbees calmly began to polish squirrel rifles and knives. Rumors ran that ammunition and other arms were selling at a fast clip in neighborhood shops. When the Klan sent around handbills announcing a rally in a field near Maxton, the Indians fixed their zero hour...