Science: PIONEERS IN SPACE-AIR FORCE SCIENTISTS FACE THE UNKNOWN

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This is only a beginning. The biggest tunnels will duplicate or simulate flight at ten times the speed of sound (7,600 m.p.h.). At this "hypersonic" speed, one of the major problems is the sudden cooling of the racing air, whose chilled oxygen and nitrogen condense into mist. To keep the air from playing this trick, it must be heated to as high as 1,500° F., and the walls must be water-cooled to keep them from fusing. One of the tunnels will need electric motors of 200,000 h.p. to push its air. The data that flow from all the tunnels will be digested instantaneously by Univac computers.

Out of the information discovered at Tullahoma will grow hypersonic missiles that will be at home in the top of the atmosphere like non-burning meteors. Presumably they will be tested in the 5,000-mile range from Patrick to Ascension Island. But before these birds can fly. the Air Force must know thousands of things about the air and the earth, the sun and the moon. It needs faster and better electronic equipment.

Headquarters for esoteric electronics is Rome Air Development Center at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York. Here the Air Force scientists work out guidance devices for the far-flying missiles, radar to detect them, and communication systems to warn of attack. One of Rome's most secret concerns is electronic warfare: methods of using radio waves to deceive and confuse an enemy attack whether by airplane or missiles.

Earth, Sun, Air. The farthest frontiers of Air Force science are the charge of Cambridge Research Center, Bedford, Mass. It is a strange outfit, and most of its programs seem to have little to do with any kind of warfare. There is a pattern, however. Aircraft of today fly in the lower atmosphere, which is not too well understood. Soon they will fly much higher where knowledge is even more scanty.

Existing missiles pass through the upper atmosphere (hardly understood at all), and future missiles will eventually move through space under the influence "of the earth's gravitation (which is not constant). So the Air Force scientists must reach for every scrap of information about the atmosphere and the earth.

One of their outlying stations is a solar observatory on Sacramento Peak, N. Mex.

(the sun stirs the air and electrifies its upper layers). Another group from Cambridge does its field work at Holloman, sending instruments up on rockets to bring back a better picture of the upper atmosphere.

Over much of the earth range the Cambridge scientists. They study the weather and try to predict it; they try to modify cloud formations; they fly instrumented B-475 into the jet stream that races around the earth; they study radiation from atomic weapons (it may be a problem for aircraft that drop them); they map in new detail the earth's magnetic field (missiles may steer by it); they study the shape of the earth and look for anomalies (variations) in its gravitational field. Missiles curving through space above the atmosphere will be affected by an anomaly, and when the first satellites hurry around the earth, their orbits will be waved and scalloped by varying forces reaching out from its center. So the Cambridge men must hurry and tell the Air Force all they can discover about the planet that earthlings ride on.

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