Word: liquidizer
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ELEVEN months ago, in a cover story on the Air Force's missile boss. Major General Bernard Schriever, TIME told the story of the U.S.'s first liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile, the Atlas. So fast has been the pace of missile development that Schriever and the Air Force are already hard at work on a new missile system that may ultimately make Atlas look like a Zeppelin. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Second Generation...
...Capabilities. The new Minuteman ICBM is a three-stage rocket, 57 ft. long, weighing 65,000 lbs., with predicted 5,500-mile range. It is designed to pack a thermonuclear warhead smaller than that of the liquid-fueled ICBM Atlas, but big enough to take out major targets. Its major components can be broken down to make shorter-range missiles; by itself the missile's third stage could make a useful tactical ballistic missile (TBM) with 500-to 1,000-mile range; its second and third stages would combine to make a 1,500-mile IRBM for use from...
...development of solid-fueled missiles. Almost as soon as scientists found solutions to solid-fuel problems, the relatively inexpensive, highly mobile, easily handled solid-fuel missiles opened up whole new prospects of operation. And at the same time they doomed to swift obsolescence the cumbersome, complex, costly, "first-generation" liquid-fuel missiles, with their big, liquid-oxygen plants, their long fueling time before launching and their intricate plumbing...
...breakthroughs came at an awesome rate. Raborn needed a reliable solid fuel, for liquid fuels are both too volatile and too bulky for shipboard use. Aerojet-General Corp. and Thiokol Chemical Corp. brought out solid fuels with a wallop ("as simple," says Raborn, "as the comb in your pocket"). Even so, solids presented a big problem: how to cut off burning with the split-second precision necessary if the missile is to land on target. (Liquid oxygen can be shut off mechanically with a valve.) The solution: a design called a retrorocket that automatically blasts portholes in the fuel chamber...
...bases, they argue, are already prime Russian targets, and SAC missile-launching sites (where liquid-fuel rockets require considerable time getting up steam) will be, too. Polaris subs, on the other hand, are moving platforms that would defy pinpointing. Moreover, with U.S.-manned Polaris subs operating in foreign waters, the nation would not need to haggle with NATO countries over placing IRBM launching sites on their soil. And finally, say the Navymen, since Polaris-plus-submarine equals an intercontinental missile, the U.S. coiild stop work on ICBMs and their-bases altogether...