Word: countdowns
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...Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile would be operational by July. A succession of five firing failures had washed out the deadline, also considerably sobered Air Force and Convair pressagents. Last week the Air Force reported with relief that an Atlas C, an advanced test model, had passed a routine countdown, then soared some 5,000 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral to deliver its one-ton nose cone with satisfying accuracy near waiting recovery ships in the South Atlan tic. But the crowing was muted; the Air Force reported a "strong indication" that it had found the basic trouble, acknowledged the likelihood...
...special division of the W.N.M.C.--the Advanced Research Projects Agency--launched the rocket from Boylston Hall at midnight May 9 "without a hitch in the countdown." A responsible source in the A.R.P.A. admitted that the missile used "the expanding gas principle and was therefore completely silent upon takeoff...
Captain Gralla and his crew spectacularly beat the odds. The weather was foul for all three shots-in the third, Norton Sound was hidden from her escorts by a snowstorm-but the rocketmanship and the seamanship were superb. Each countdown, with 60 Navy and civilian technicians briskly at work, took six hours. Minutes before firing, rocketmen removed the heated blanket draped around the bird to keep electrical relays from freezing up. Then they took cover, while the firing officer waited until the ship was at the right degree of pitch and roll to enable the rocket...
Steady Platform. In the blockhouse, Debus listened as the clipped argot of the missilemen's countdown came over the loudspeaker: "Telemetry-on. Radar beacon-on. DOVAP*-on." Hundreds of men both in and out of the blockhouse were doing thousands of things. The rocket itself had come awake. In its guidance section, a gyroscopically stabilized platform was accurately aligned with the intended course. When the rocket rose into the sky, the platform would keep steady in space, allowing the rocket's computer brain to steer by it as if it were both a compass and a horizon...
...systems† are go," continued the countdown...