(2 of 3)
A President of the United States who is Roman Catholic and whose grandfather was a saloonkeeper? And who comes from Boston, the home of Mayor Curley! Heaven deliver us.
JOHN R. STEVENSON Yoder Presbyterian Church Yoder, Wyo.
Sir:
Mr. Kennedy is attractive. I have met the young man, and I'd love to have him for a younger brother or a kissing cousin, and I'd like to have his money. But I observed one thing about Mr. Kennedy that frightens me as far as voting for him is concerned. Mr. Kennedy is a snob. A nice snob. A born snob. But he is a snob.
GLORIA C. GROUSE
Lansing, Va.
Sir:
Nowhere in your article is it clear whether he is called Jack or John.
CHARLES F. MCCADDEN
Tuskegee, Ala. ¶Both.—ED.
Sir:
Henry Koerner's cover portrait strikes me as an excellent piece of art, bold, expressive, and imaginative, worthy of our best American tradition. Let us see more of that kind of art.
FRANCIS J. LORSCHEID
Lakota, N. Dak.
To Outer Space
Sir:
The following facts should be added to your Dec. 2 account, "Defending Meteors." Three charges were fired simultaneously from an Aerobee rocket at the Holloman Air Force Base, N. Mex. on Oct. 16. They were prepared by Dr. Thomas C. Poulter of the Stanford Research Institute, Dr. John S. Rinehart of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, my collaborator, Joseph F. Cuneo, and myself. The meteors were fired at a speed of at least nine miles per second and at a height of 55 miles, above which the atmosphere remaining was quite insufficient to slow them to below seven miles per second, which is the escape velocity from the earth. Our artificial meteors are therefore the first macroscopic pieces of matter launched by man into interplanetary space never to return.
Project "Artificial Meteor" was originally proposed by me eleven years ago. After a first unsuccessful attempt, from a V-2 rocket at White Sands, N. Mex. on Dec. 17, 1946, it received no further support until Dr. Maurice Dubin of the Geophysical Research Directorate, U.S.A.F., invited the mentioned groups to collaborate, and through his superb coordination brought about the successful launching of the meteors into orbits around the sun.
F. ZWICKY Professor of Astrophysics California Institute of Technology Pasadena, Calif.
Sir:
The speculations in your article made interesting reading. The experiment was undertaken in the hope that shaped charges would help answer some important questions in meteor physics, e.g., controlled experiments concerning the luminous efficiency of meteors and other hypervelocity effects. The results of this experiment have led to some conjecture on my part, too.
MAURICE DUBIN
Boston
Plane Facts
Sir: