Sixty-Mile Flare

On the night of March 14 the sky over Holloman Air Force Base, N. Mex. was vacuum-clear with stars thick beyond it. At 1145 a.m. a slender Aerobee rocket rose from a launching tower, the bright flame of its exhaust dwindling to a spark and disappearing among the crowding stars. Then, when the rocket was 60 miles up, a new star bloomed in the sky, brighter than the planet Venus. Swiftly it grew, spreading in ten minutes to four times the diameter of the moon, and shedding half the full moon's brilliance. At this stage the glowing spot was three miles across and was giving far more light than could be accounted for by any sort of fuel carried up by the rocket. Slowly it dimmed and dissipated, turning into a hazy streak like the Milky Way.

Last week, in a flat technical report, the Air Force Cambridge Research Center gave ample evidence that the midnight phenomenon marked a fascinating new breakthrough in high altitude science.

Stored Sunlight. Scientists have long known that sunlight striking the atmosphere 60 miles above the earth breaks two-atom oxygen molecules (62) into single oxygen atoms. Normally the single atoms recombine when they come into contact with nitric oxide as a catalyst. Since there is only a tiny trace of this gas in the high atmosphere, they recombine slowly, releasing enough energy in the process to produce a hardly perceptible glow in the night sky.

Taking this knowledge into the laboratory, a team of Air Force scientists led by Dr. Murray Zelikoff proved that small additions of nitric oxide can quickly unlock the energy stored in atomized oxygen. To test their conclusions on the atmospheric scale, they loaded steel cylinders containing 20 Ibs. of nitric oxide into the Aerobee, which triggered Holloman's celestial show at the 60-mile level.

Nobody knows how much energy is stored in the layer of atomic oxygen, but since the supply is renewed every day by sunlight, it should be inexhaustible. This opens up some interesting possibilities. In an earlier experiment the Cambridge men discovered that when nitric oxide is re leased in daytime, it is acted upon by sunlight and forms a dense cloud of electrified particles that reflect radio waves as a mirror reflects light. A few such reflectors properly spaced around the curve of the earth might support new kinds of long-range communication. Rockets fired at night might illuminate large areas if they released substantial amounts of nitric oxide. The gas is effective as long as it is sufficiently concentrated; it is not consumed by the reaction that it triggers.

Self-Fueled Missiles. A more exciting possibility is that the newly discovered reaction could be used to propel missiles or even aircraft. Nitric oxide may not be the only catalyst that works. The scientists speculate that some solid catalyst might be made into a tube or a honeycomb. When carried swiftly by a rocket through the upper air, it would swallow great volumes of atomic oxygen and make it combine into O2 molecules.

If the energy given off were applied to a kind of jet propulsion, it could theoretically keep a rocket or plane flying indefinitely, as long as it stays in the atomic oxygen layer. An aircraft that can find its own fuel 60 miles above the earth has obvious value, both for war and for peace.

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