Word: braun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...night last week the Explorer was ready. Lox vapors (liquid oxygen) waved in the floodlights' glow. In Central Control, scientific and technical missilemen tended their network of instruments. In the Pentagon at that moment, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker and the Jupiter's top Scientist Wernher von Braun joined a score of other military and civilian officials in the Army's telecommunications room, seated themselves at a table before two huge screens, one enlarging teletype messages from the Cape, the other carrying Pentagon messages back to the site. Elaborately, Von Braun lectured the attending brass on the rocket...
...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...
...satellite terms, the history began on June 25, 1954 in Room 1803 of the T-3 Building in Washington's Office of Naval Research. Among the service and civilian scientists present to discuss the possibility of firing a satellite into outer space was Dr. Wernher von Braun, father of the German V-2 turned U.S. Army missile expert. Von Braun assured the group that the Redstone missile, already developed at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. and successfully fired at Cape Canaveral in 1953, could be souped up to put a 5-lb. satellite into outer...
...were heavy on the White House to dissociate the satellite program from weaponry so the world's neutralists would not be offended. In retrospect, giving jurisdiction of the satellite programs to the service that knew least about it was a blunder-and it was protested by Medaris, Von Braun & Co. But the Huntsville team had some consolation: it did have a 1955 go-ahead on the Jupiter intermediate-range missile...
Then Came Termites. Jupiter was put into blazing competition with the Air Force's Thor IRBM, and the race more than occupied the energies of the Huntsville scientists. Even so, says Von Braun, the Army missilemen "had clear sailing for about a year." And then: "The termites got into the system again." Ironically, some of the termites were hatched by the Army itself...