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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (March 25, 1963)
10 B MONDAY. MARCH 25. 1963 MEDFORD MAIL TRIBUNE. MEDFORD. OREGON pacecraft lesigners Oontinually Plagued with f roblems By JOSEPH L. MYLER United Preu International Washington - HJPD - There must be days when a space craft designer wishes he had got into some other line of work. There seems to be a law operating out there which says that whatever you do, you may wish you hadn't. For example, if you shield against one kind of radiation danger, you may increase vul nerability to another. Streaking through space at speed approaching the veloc ity of light are nuclear par ticles which make a clean wound, so to speak, when they pierce a human body. Unless they course through particularly sensitive tissue. like that of the brain, these fantastically energetic projec tiles from outer space do rel atively little harm. Tinv Bullets But suppose a. spacecraft designer wanted, lo take no chances whatever. Suppose he built shields around his craft which would be abso lutely impervious to these tiny bullets. The shielding would be so massive that no rocket ever Imagined could possibly lift it off the pad If the spacecraft designer compromised with a shield that would merely slow down these high speed particles, he would be compounding the danger. Shooting through the body at reduced speed, the nuclear projectiles would have more time to spread their energy around and thus would do far more damage. They also, upon collision with atoms in the shield, would trigger so-called secon daries whose effect might well be disas'rous. Atomic warfare suggests an analogy. An exploding A bomb might not knock down a reinforced concrete build ing some distance away. But the blast might create a host of secondary projectiles in the form of shattered glass, chip ped concrete and other loose or loosened objects wnicn would kill or wund every body in the building. Indirectly Delected Recently a primary particle from a distant galaxy was indirectly detected by a re cording station installed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a mesa top in New Mexico. , This one particle was so tiny that if you inflated it trillions of times it still would be invisible to the naked eye. But it also was so powerful that when it hit atoms in the earth's atmosphere, it trigger ed a shower of secondary par ticles which bombarded the entire mesa, an area of several square miles. The atom smasher at the Brookhaven National Labora tory on Long Island drives nu clear particles at energies up to 30 billion electron volts. The particle which invaded New Mexico had three billion times that much energy. Such particles presumably are rare;, this one was detected only because a recording sta tion happened to have been built at the place where it arrived. But space swarms with other nuclear particles which, though less energetic, are far more numerous. . There are the particles spewed from the sun when solar flares erupt on its sur face. There are the particles in the natural and artificial radiation belts around the earth. . Fairly Energolic The particles in the radia tion belts are considered to be fairly energetic, for them, if they pick the equivalent of more than 100,000 electron volts. A particle carrying 100,000 electron volts of energy would be only on quintillionth (one over one followed by 15 zeros) as powerful as the New Mex ican invader. Hertofore space craft designers have assumed that particles so feeble could be ignored. Now come Edward Lodi David Crowther of the Lock heed Research Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif., with news that 100,000-volt particles also can make trouble. Such particles, they report, can reduce the power output of solar cells supplying elec tricity to spacecraft Instru ments. It has long been known that particles of higher ener gy in the radiation zones would damage unprotected solar cells. These higher energy parti cles lower the cells' capacity to produce current. The low energy particles, Lodi and Crowther discovered, reduce the cells' capacity to produce voltage. ' And, of course, it takes both current and volt age to produce power. Frustrating Low So the spacecraft designer now must do something about the numerous low as well as the high energy particles..This is where that frustrating space law (whatever you do may be wrong) comes in. If ,you shield against the higher energy particles, you can cut down their speed, all right, and avert the special kind of damage they do. In the act, however, you convert them into low energy parti cles. The upshot is that, in pre venting one kind of damage, you are merely increasing the chances of suffering another kind. Who d want to be a space craft designer? Didn't Erase Doubts West in Skeptical Frame of Mind At Demonstration of Computer "OIL TO BURN" Mobilheit S & H Green Stamp MEDFORD FUEL CO. 772-2111 "5 V:-"'' :;v,i:r. ;.:(.:;. .. . - ; . '- - - ' ' , ' : UNLOADED FROM TRANSPORT - Atlas rockeL 130-D Is unloaded from transport airplane after flight from San Diego, Calif. Rocket will be used to boost U.S. Astronaut Gordon Cooper Jr. on 22-orbit space voyage now planned for mid-May. Atlas was taken lo hangar and will be Install ed on launching pad No. 14 in a few days. (NASA photo via UPI) r;fi By DICK WEST United Press International Washington-dlPB-Roughly 30 years ago, I blew an entire week's allowance-roughly 15 cents - on a ticket to a tent show that was billed as "P r o f e s sor Moriarity and and his talk ing horse." The memory of that eve n i n g still , weit pains me be cause I was roundly gulled. All the horse did was answer the professor's questions by shaking his head or stamping a forefoot. . I'll concede they were hard questions, b u t intelligence wasn't the issue. When I pay money to see a talking horse, I expect something more than sign language. At those prices, he should have recited Mark Antony's funeral oration. Approaches Show Skeptically Once burned, twice shy, as Socrates used to say, and so it was with considerable skep ticism that I went to a dem onstration this week of what was billed as a "talking com puter." The computer, called Tele vox, was developed by the Teleregister Corp. of Stan ford, Conn., to serve the needs of members of the American Stock Exchange in New York. When it goes into operation later this year, brokers will be able to pick up a tele phone, dial the computer's number and hear it recite the latest stock quotations, which at times can be even more eloquent than Mark Antony. Teleregister staged the dem onstration here in hopes of selling a few talking com puters to the federal govern ment. A spokesman said they could be adapted to many uses, including airline traffic control. If radar showed that two airliners were on a collision course, he explained, the com puter would recognize the danger and warn the pilots. Causes Some Discussion This caused some discussion in the audience as to what form the warning should take. , I suggested to a fellow sit ting next to me that the com puter should scream "look out!" But he said that might startle the pilots and cause them to jerk the controls or something. He said it would be better for the computer to appeal to Nehru Cities Red Troop Movements New Delhi - OJPD - Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told parliament Saturday the Chinese Communists have moved 2,000 troops up to the India-Tibet border and said they may be planning new ag gression. Nehru, speaking before the lower house, said Peking had sent a series of notes to the Indian government in the past few weeks and that they "have become sharp and prot vocative, some actually scuril lous." While Nehru spoke Chinese Communist Foreign Minister Chen Yi, in a statement broad cast by the Communist New China news agency, renewed the attack on India with a charge India was stepping up its war preparations "with imperialist military aid." Firemen Called to Check Smoke Odor Employees at the Groce teria Super Food Market at Sixth and Grape sts. smelled the odor of smoke near the meat case and called firemen at 8:38 p.m. Saturday. But when firemen arrived, they couldn't find or smell anything. The odor had ap parently dissipated in the meantime. . . their reason, telling them "Come now, fellows, this won't do." The computer, whose voice is a rich metallic tenor, has a vocabulary of 62 speech sounds, which is larger than the vocabulary of many talk ing dogs and is indisputably an improvement over Profes sor Moriarty's horse. In all fairness I would have to say that it gave a convinc ing performance, but it didn't entirely erase my doubts. I couldn't help but wonder if Televox was actually doing the talking or whether there was another computer back stage that was a ventriloquist. Magician Featured At Veterans Show While City - Oregon State Elks association's regular monthly night at the Veterans Administration last week featured Johnny Eads, ma gician. Tom Ginn, alternate Elks representative for Emil B. Kroeger, presided. .Ginn introduced Reuel K. Ryans, newly elected Exalted Ruler of the Medford lodge. Eads, ,a disabled veteran whose rehabilitation came through the Veterans Admin istration, is manager of a neon sign company in Medford. ELECTED CHAIRMAN Salem - fUPl) - Rep. 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