Science: Defending Meteors

Space-minded strategists, some of them official, have plugged for satellites as orbiting dugouts from which operations might be conducted against the earth below. A relatively minor experiment that the Air Force told about last week showed that satellite-based aggression may not be so easy as it sounds. On the night of Oct. 16 a standard Aerobee research rocket was fired at Holloman Air Force Base, N. Mex. At 35 miles altitude the nose separated from the rest of the rocket and coasted up to 55 miles. Then the nose exploded, but in no ordinary way. Inside its aluminum skin it carried...

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