A good 1,600 miles southeastward from Florida last week, watchers aboard the Navy's salvage ship Escape spotted a white object as it hurtled out of the sky and plunged into the Atlantic. It was the nose cone of a Jupiter IRBM, launched only minutes earlier from a pad at the Cape Canaveral missile test center. Hoisted aboard Escape, the recovered cone proved that the Army had solved both the reentry problem and the accuracy problem. Hitting the target area at a range of 1,600 miles was a feat of marksmanship considerably more remarkable than nicking a dime with a rifle at...
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