Operation Upward

Step by step, the Army was approaching the push-button millennium when giant military rockets will travel thousands of miles cargoed with wholesale death. Recently, at White Sands, N.M., a German V-2 roared up 104 miles, 20.5 miles higher than the previous record. In its nose it carried an armored capsule packed with instruments for observing pressures, temperatures and cosmic rays.

The rocket crashed to earth 69 miles from the launching platform, knocking a hole in New Mexico, but the instrument capsule landed undamaged. The data it contained, said rocket master Colonel Harold R. Turner, should tell scientists much about the outermost atmosphere, mysterious cruising ground of rocket warfare.

One by one, the Army was using up its captured V-2s, growing wise and skilled in the process. When the last are gone, rockets of U.S. design should be ready to better the V-2s' records, in the invasion of the ionosphere. "One of 'our most important projects," said Air General George C. Kenny, U.S. member of the United Nations Military Staff Committee, "is in the field of guided missiles."

Atom Engines. At war's end rockets powered with chemical fuels (alcohol and liquid oxygen) were already formidable weapons, and their limit of range and accuracy had not been approached by their German masters. But the age of rockets would not really dawn until atomic energy had been harnessed to propel them. With this in mind, the Army Air Forces recently signed a contract with the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp. to develop atomic aircraft motors.

Several approaches were guessable. A small plutonium pile might serve as a source of heat to drive some conventional engine, using steam or other fluid as a heat-transfer agent. More radical, and probably more interesting to imaginative technicians, would be a motor using atomic energy direct. This would be possible if "fissionable material" could be made to "explode slowly" like the propellent material in a bazooka projectile. The products of the slow explosion would have to stream out in one direction, giving a powerful, sustained push in the opposite direction. The obstacles blocking either approach were admittedly enormous. "Even contemplating the problems," said an Air Forces spokesman last week, "makes the viscera of some of us refuse to function."

Scientists and soldiers went on functioning anyhow, hoped inside that it would be long years before the day of the long-range, accurately aimed atomic rocket actually dawned.

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