As the fuels of the space and atom age get more powerful, they also get harder to handle. Last week General Bernard Schriever, new chief of the Air Forces Research and Development Command, announced that liquid hydrogen, until recently hardly more than a laboratory curiosity, is being produced in considerable quantities as a rocket fuel. Liquid hydrogen is tricky stuff; it boils at minus 423° F., only about 37° above absolute zero. If it is not stored in elaborately insulated containers, it quickly turns to hydrogen gas, and a small amount of the gas makes a dangerous explosive mixture with the...
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