Word: padding
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Last fall Navy Lieut. Commander John E. Draim of the Naval Missile Center at Point Mugu, Calif, wondered why the ocean, which the Navy naturally loves and appreciates, could not be used as a launching pad. A water pad would be costless, he figured, as well as self-cooling and self-healing...
Missiles and satellite-launching rockets are plenty complicated in themselves, but the pads from which they take off are even more complex. They are tangles of cranes, wires, dugouts and flame-deflectors, and as they increase in size they soar in cost. Besides being expensive, the launching pads are vulnerable; if a present-day rocket explodes on its pad, it may do millions of dollars of damage. The pad for the upcoming Saturn rocket, for example, will cost something like $30 million, and if a Saturn explodes on takeoff, it will destroy most of this investment and spread devastation...
...Doppler Effect. Lofted by an Air Force Thor-Able-Star rocket. Transit I-B slanted around the world from 51° N. to 51° S. and settled into an elliptical orbit (apogee, 475 miles; perigee, 235 miles), sending radio signals from the moment it left the pad. From Texas to Hampshire, England, tracking stations sent information to a computing center near Washington, D.C. In future models, orbit-predicting data will be quickly rebroadcast to the satellite, which will remember its daily itinerary on magnetic tape, constantly announce it from space (the day-to-day orbital variations are minuscule...
With a huge gush of smoke and flame, the three-stage Thor-Able rocket last week roared from its Cape Canaveral launching pad, soon to swirl its 270-lb. package into orbit around the earth. To the scientific skeptics who claim that satellites are little more than spectacular stunts, that package provided a spectacularly practical answer: looking down from hundreds of miles in space, it could take and transmit pictures of the earth and its cloud-splotched atmosphere. At the very least...
...better or worse, air defense in Canada is inextricably tied to the U.S.'s ill-starred Bomarc B antiaircraft missile. Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker has found it to be mostly worse: every time a Bomarc B failed to soar from its test pad at Cape Canaveral, Canada's Liberal and CCF (socialist) Opposition parties gleefully assaulted the Bomarc as a dying bird. In the process they winged Tory plans to rely on two Canadian Bomarc bases and nine aging squadrons of CF-100 interceptors as the country's only home defense against the bomber threat...