The La s
By TO Vice-Persident, 7
I t h a s b e e n my privilege to have been engaged in the airplane and more recently the missile business for the last 40 years. One of the most important things about missiles is the firing •—- what we call the “ count down.” Usually you try to get this vital phase of mis sile testing into a few hours and everything must be right. When I first started in the airplane business in Bristol, England, not very much was known about aerodynam ics. But when something did go wrong, there was always a man up in the cockpit who could at least try to make things operate right. Such is not the case in the missile business. There’s no man up in the cockpit, and reliability becomes a vital necessity. You can’t have nuts and bolts that are not properly tightened, or electrical connections which are not properly soldered. Reliability is really impor tant. Hundreds of tubes and gadgets and electronic contraptions of one kind or
another are involved. This missile fir ing business is extremely complex in the testing phase, and the main pur pose of the count down is to check to be sure everything is in 'place and operating properly. Loose wires or loose connections can cause misfirings. The last few minutes of a count down is like walking the maternity ward when your first child is born. You wonder if the doctor is there, and you wonder what’s going to happen, and the minutes seem like hours, and you wait, and wait, and wait. It seems like years. This is typical configuration of a modem missile or rocket: It is about 60 feet high, weighs from two to 20 tons, and probably has two or three engines. The second part has the brain. At about 70 miles up, the brain tells the first part to blow itself off. It is traveling about 12,000 miles an hour at the time. Another engine is now started, and that continues up until it gets to about 300 miles. Then the end pieces and other excess bag-
gage are blown off until only a com paratively small ball or projectile is left. This is what orbits at 500 to 2,500 miles out, at about 18,000 miles an hour, and we expect it to stay up there for anywhere from five months to 200 years. From these orbiting spheres or projectiles we accumulate scientific information. That is the simple way a missile fires: simple, yet very complicated. And that is why we go through a count down. Some have said that the satellite proves there is no God. To me it proves the exact opposite. The only reason that we can orbit is because God has set up some rules and regu lations and laws. The same force that keeps the stars going keeps the satel lite going when it is set in its right orbit. Only when it picks up a lot of dust and develops a drag and slows itself down does it come down to earth again. This proves one thing: that God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and He did it by the word of His power. And, as we have a count down in the missile business, God has had many count downs in this world. Let’s consider two or three of them. In Genesis we read about Abraham and Isaac. This was truly a count down for Abraham. Here he was, a successful business man and going along fine, with Isaac a special son of his wife’s old age. And then one day God says to him, “ Abraham, take this son of thine and go out to Mount Moriah and offer him up as a sacri fice.” I had a son, our only child, and we lost him at nine years of age. If God had ever said to me, “ Now look, Tom, take this boy of yours and go out and offer him as a sacrifice,” I’m afraid I would have had to turn around and say, “ I don’t understand this, God, what is it? What are you saying?” But we read that Abraham went out and both of them together went to Mount Moriah. This was a wonderful combination; the son talks to the father, the father talks to the son. And they came to the last few miles, the last few minutes
U.S. Army's Jupiter missile stands in the gantry servicing crane prior to launching. Exhaustive tests on the IR6M continue after the crane is moved away and until just before the actual launching. — Official U.S. Army photograph, released by Defense Dept.
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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