Science: Reaching for the Moon

(See Cover) On a stony California ridge, a rocket engine wide as a barn door lit the sky like an erupting volcano, while its roar racketed for 45 miles across the Mojave Desert. In a quiet Massachusetts laboratory, scientists carefully tuned a new and incredibly sensitive radio receiver designed to trap signals from far-out space. All over the U.S. last week, the story was the same: thousands of scientists and engineers sweated over strange new jobsāˆ’jobs more difficult than any they had ever attempted before. In a frenzy of creativeness they were producing new materials, machines, instruments, methods of measurement and...

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