Word: padding
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With a shore-shaking roar, an 85-ft. Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile shot from its Cape Canaveral launching pad in Florida one afternoon last week, less than two minutes later ignominiously exploded. The failure of the missile (control-system malfunction, officials explained) was bad enough; worse, this Atlas was the first fully powered U.S.-made ICBM to be flight-tested. It carried for the first time a wedge-shaped tactical nose cone capable of carrying a hydrogen-bomb warhead, and it was powered by three engines that burned simultaneously from the moment of ignition and generated more than...
...feel of it, we tried some experiments. With the plane refueled, we headed back to the acrobatic area. Brett's usual rear-seat man, ist Lieut. Arthur Brattkus, had prepared a mental-alertness test for me during our coffee break. On the back pages of a scratch pad he had written three elementary problems in arithmetic. These represented a mild foretaste of what a space pilot might have to do in the weightless state. Would my gravity-free brain be clear enough to solve them...
...first parabola of the second series, I flipped over the thigh pad to tackle the first problem: multiply 13 by .9. The reaction was surprising. Squinting over the oxygen mask, I could not be sure whether there was a decimal point in the multiplier or just a speck in the paper. Irrationally, I felt hostile to Brattkus for not having been more careful. Just as irrationally, the decision I had to make (was it a decimal point or wasn't it?) seemed momentously important. I got off this dilemma by doing the multiplication, writing the answers for both possibilities...
...school are on, and he's got a stack of big ones to buy the hard stuff and muscle in on the gig. So he sounds the cat that pushes the junk, and then he tries to score. So they fall up to the main man's pad, and before you can blast a joint, everybody is tuned in. The main man offers him a pop of H, but this kid ain't dry-he's a plainclothes fuzz. And the next day, when it's time to deliver the stuff, there...
...really dependable safety device, say Huston and Miller, should tell on its own when the reactor is starting an excursion. The best way to trigger its action is to combine a pad of material containing uranium with a layer of high-melting solder. When the neutrons in the reactor rise above a critical level, showing that an excursion has started, the uranium fissions at a rate that creates enough heat to melt the solder. Then high-pressure gas will shoot neutron-absorbing poison into the reactor. Even if other controls have failed, this last-ditch nuclear fire extinguisher will keep...