Word: countdowns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...countdown had begun. On the roof of a building near the launching sites, 50 newsmen trained eyes and cameras on Jupiter-C, only a mile and a half away. Nerves tingled as each heart-leaping minute of the countdown squawked over an intercom box. At 9:42 a mournful warning horn sounded from the launching area. Two red warning lights blinked steadily. The white rocket fumed and smoked, growing whiter and colder under the pebbled casing of ice caused by the subfreezing liquid oxygen. The service structure moved away on its tracks...
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...
...billion to $80 billion budget; contrariwise, penny-saving House Appropriations Committee Chairman Clarence Cannon has harrumphed that "a great many people are going to use national defense as a reason to bolster their requests for bigger appropriations." What will finally come out will be clear only when the countdown ends late this spring...
...highly organized, and many of the boys who build do-it-yourself rockets are planning to go into the missile business when they finish school. Some of their rockets are semiprofessional jobs with recovery parachutes and other fancy features. They are launched with proper precautions: dugouts, red flag, a countdown, all the fixings...