[reply to Vin Suprynowicz' February 1, 2003
This
Bus Goes Nowhere]
Dear Vin,
It's probably no exaggeration to say that the
space shuttle program and the space program in general could be the poster
child for projects of human endeavor warped almost beyond all recognition by
government meddling and military secret agendas. That the whole thing was a big money-wasting contest to drive the
Russians to bankruptcy has the ring of truth, and as wartime tragedies go, the
occasional barbecued astronaut is easier to spin to the voting and taxpaying
public than are endless reports of whole battalions slaughtered or sunk by the
shipload. I would suggest a saber-rattling side to it as well -- getting a ton
of anything into orbit and back with any degree of reliability is no mean feat,
be it a ton of astronauts and their equipment or a ton of nuclear bombs. The highly publicized launch of a manned
spacecraft makes the dramatic point to anyone paying attention that it could
just as well have been a multi-megaton nuclear warhead alighting gently on a
neighborhood near them. Even assuming
that fissile heavy metals have millions of times the explosive efficiency of
TNT, one or more multi-megaton nukes can still weigh several tons, so the
ability to launch that kind of weight on a rocket is critical to a global
nuclear delivery system. I have heard
it suggested that the Russians' supposed initial lead in the space race was due
less to their better rocket-building and more to our better bomb-building, that
is, ours were much better-designed and lighter, requiring less of a booster.
But why rockets, which are intrinsically
dangerous and unreliable, especially given that the Air Force were already
flying into space with airplanes at the inception of the Mercury program in the
fifties, as portrayed in the film The Right Stuff? Rockets, or ballistic missiles, happen to be
the fastest way to get a nuclear payload to the other side of the planet, while
an equivalent system based on aircraft could never provide reliable
first-strike capability against a rocket-based system. The safety factor of rockets doesn't matter
from a military standpoint, so long as enough of the bombs hit their targets --
one simply overbuilds to cover the reliability shortfall. We'll never know if aircraft would have led to
a better, safer, cheaper way into space, since that avenue was scrubbed when
the rocket-based space program began (at least as far as the public was
concerned, anyway).
But why stop there? Just for the sake of argument, why are airplanes shaped the way
they are? While a Frisbee can take a
severe dog-chewing or even a shotgun blast and still fly just fine, a fraction
of the equivalent damage to an airplane would send it crashing to the ground,
probably in multiple pieces. As a
recent cover story in Popular Mechanics attests, it seems that the Nazis
had a fairly mature flying disk technology, which we captured but kept secret
until only recently, favoring development of winged aircraft instead. Airplanes tend to be much more sensitive to
damage or system failure and less stable than a flying wing or disk, but instability
goes hand-in-glove with maneuverability, while a flying wing or disk tends to
handle like an airborne boat.
Maneuverability is irrelevant, even wasteful, when hauling cargo or
passengers, but critical to military applications where one may be shot at,
pursued, or need to pursue, shoot at, or otherwise surprise an enemy in the air
or on the surface. This changed around
1980 when the advent of technologies like the Stinger anti-aircraft missile -- convenient, easy-to-use, shoulder-launched, very fast, very smart guidance
system, thousands of them everywhere -- began to make it "kinetically impossible" to get out of the way of a missile which was very, very fast and possibly
launched by surprise from very nearby.
At this point the buzz became "stealth" technology and warplanes like
the B2 bomber, which happens to be a flying wing -- bird-shaped aircraft have
lots of sharp edges and corners that give them a big radar signature while
simpler shapes are easier to make "stealthy."
So, if you've ridden in (or crashed in) a
commercial airliner, in a sense you've done volunteer duty as a Guinea pig in a
gigantic aerospace industry effort to test and improve military aircraft, since
all the manufacturers -- Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, Fokker, Airbus, et al -- also
make warplanes. In fact, the 747 was originally
built to be a military cargo jet, was rejected in favor of the C-130, but
Boeing decided to go ahead and produce it commercially. If commercial aviation had been the primary
objective all along, it's not unlikely that the base design would be very
different. Just think how happy you'd
be to step aboard a commercial airliner if you knew that there was a competing
technology that was potentially more airworthy, more crashworthy, and generally
more reliable (but with comparatively little or no military application)?
In short, involvement of the government-run
military-industrial complex in aerospace has perverted not only the means but
also the ends. This outcome is
inevitable, since military and civilian perspectives on engineering concepts
such as reliability, for instance, are fundamentally and irreconcilably
different. One example is how Stalin's
tanks were supposedly so badly built that they would break down after only an
hour of continuous operation, but this was perfectly acceptable since under
real battle conditions, a tank was sure to be hit and disabled by the enemy in
far less time. So any attempt to make
them more reliable was simply a waste of resources better spent on building
more tanks. This is a great philosophy
if success is defined only as getting there "The firstest with the mostest," as
Confederate General Nathan Forrest termed it, but a frighteningly bad
philosophy if you kiss loved ones good-bye as they board with anything more
than just a hope of kissing them hello again, or if economics are at all an
issue. If we hadn't been doing one
while pretending we were doing the other for the past fifty-odd years, the
argument could be made that we would at least have penal colonies on Mars, the
Moon, and in orbit, be actively mining the asteroids, and busily terraforming
Mars by now, and perhaps a great deal more.
It is truly a shame and a waste.
Jay Dearien