Breaking the Chains of Gravity Read online

  A near-term future conflict wasn’t an implausible scenario. The uneasy postwar peace risked erupting into a fresh conflict, not between the Allies and old Axis powers but between the West and forces behind the political Iron Curtain surrounding the Soviet Union. Premier Joseph Stalin had agreed to an alliance with the United States against Japanese forces in the Second World War’s Pacific Theater on the condition that the Soviets gain a sphere of influence in northeast China after the Japanese surrender. Four years after the war’s end, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded as a transatlantic security agreement designed in part to contain Soviet aggression and expansion through Asia while simultaneously preventing a renewed European militarism. Signed on April 4, 1949, the treaty made it clear that an armed attack against one cosigning nation would be regarded as an attack against all of them, and retaliatory action fell within the parameters of an acceptable response.

  Unfortunately, containment in Asia had not gone well after the Second World War ended. After the Japanese surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945, the Soviet Union sent troops into Japanese-occupied Northern Korea. When American troops arrived in the southern part of Korea, the Soviets began cutting roads and lines of communication at the thirty-eighth parallel. Two separate governments were emerging. North Korea had strong Soviet and eventually Chinese support, including Soviet military training and arms for its soldiers. The north refused to participate in a United Nations mandated election and remained under the dictatorial rule of Kim Il Sung while South Korea elected Syngman Rhee as president.

  As the new decade drew near, the threat of civil war in Korea that could demand American involvement sparked the U.S. Army’s need for new arms, and von Braun was called upon to help his new homeland. The army wanted surface-to-surface missiles, one with a 150-mile range and another with a five-hundred-mile range. The facilities at White Sands were just too small to develop and test missiles this large, so to build these rockets the Germans were going to have to relocate to Huntsville, Alabama. During the Second World War, the Army Ordnance and Chemical Warfare Service had opened two arsenals near Huntsville to produce munitions, bringing a brief but lucrative period of employment and growth to the small town. Deactivated at the end of the war, the Redstone Arsenal was subsequently reactivated in November of 1948, and the Army Ordnance Rocket Center was established there on an interim basis the following February before officially opening in June. At the same time, the newly inactive Huntsville Arsenal, a Chemical Corps installation next to the Redstone Arsenal, was appropriated by the Ordnance Research and Development Division Suboffice of Rockets at Fort Bliss so the influx of personnel heading for Huntsville would have adequate workspace. The Ordnance Guided Missile Center was established at the Redstone Arsenal five days later.

  But first, bureaucratic demands called for von Braun to formally begin the immigration process. The Peenemünde group’s entrance into the United States under Operation Overcast and Project Paperclip earned them military sponsorship that didn’t translate into American citizenship. On November 2, 1949, von Braun and an American officer in civilian clothes took a streetcar to Juárez, Mexico, the city his V-2 had nearly bombed two years earlier. There he went to the American consulate, presented his papers, submitted to the requisite chest X-ray, paid his eighteen-dollar processing fee, and returned back to the border with a stamp on his passport. The whole thing has been prearranged with Mexican and American officials, but the formality was a legal necessity. Finally, after living in the United States for nearly five years, von Braun began the mandatory five-year waiting period before he could formally apply to become an American.

  Von Braun left Texas for Alabama on April 10, 1950, and upon his arrival became the new center’s director. Here, he was finally given the chance to develop a new rocket that had its roots in the V-2 but ultimately advanced the state of the art of rocketry, though he did inherit some older programs. The army’s ongoing Hermes C1 program was also moved to the new Guided Missile Center where it became the research pathfinder for the proposed five-hundred-mile range missile as well as test bed to perfect technologies for the smaller 150-mile range missile the army hoped to develop. What the army wanted to avoid was a crash program to develop a missile quickly. Army chiefs felt there were already enough conventional arms available. Von Braun thus had the time to evaluate his new missile system to ensure upgrades and variants would keep this rocket in the army’s arsenal as long as possible. In support of this long-term goal was a union between industry, science, and the Ordnance department that pulled together some of the best minds in the nation without having to establish a large science personnel directorate within the service, something that would have been a long, bureaucratic, and expensive process.

  With the German contingent gone from White Sands, the American V-2 program wound down and closed within a year. In total, sixty-seven captured and reconditioned V-2s had launched from American soil. After the twenty-seventh missile, the steering and guidance components and electrical cables were American made, increasing the percentage of successful launches. Thirty-two of the Project Hermes launches were classified as failures, but rarely could the root cause be isolated. Nevertheless, the V-2 Hermes program achieved what it set out to do. It was a research program that returned a wealth of data about the missile and gave American Army personnel, scientists, and engineers valuable experience in handling and dealing with large rockets. However, as a research program, there had been no real attempt within the Hermes project to change or improve on the German components, save for changes to basic components that were necessary to get a particular rocket off the ground. But what seemed to be a pending war in Korea thawed the impasse that had kept von Braun and his colleagues inactive at White Sands. Now in Huntsville, the Germans were going back to work, but they wouldn’t be the only ones. Rocket technology was also entering the realm of manned flight in the hands of the air force.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rockets Meet Airplanes

  North of Los Angeles and the San Bernardino Mountains lies the Mojave Desert. In the arid region, the days can be scorchingly hot and the nights bone-chillingly cold. The beautiful, panoramic sunrises and sunsets are at odds with the violent dust storms that can sweep through the area without warning. For centuries, jackrabbits and coyotes were the sole residents among the low brush and Joshua trees, disturbed only by the occasional lone traveler or family passing through the desert toward the gold-rich mountains. Then in 1876, the Southern Pacific Railroad routed a line through the region. The Santa Fe Railroad followed with another line in 1882 and built a water stop named Rod, adjacent to the immense Rodriguez Dry Lake. Rodriguez was anglicized and shortened to Rogers Dry Lake in the early 1900s when the Corum family arrived and called the desert site home. They set up alfalfa and turkey farms; as more settlers came, the family leased land to homesteaders for one dollar an acre. Before long, the Corums dug water wells, set up a general store, and established a post office. But the family’s request to formally name the town Corum was denied by the United States Postal Service; there was sure to be confusion with the existing town of Coram, California. So the Corums reversed the spelling of their family name and Muroc, California, was born.

  To Army Air Corps Lieutenant Colonel Henry “Hap” Arnold, this expansive land of rattlesnakes dotted with homesteads was a perfect bombing range. The Rogers dry lake bed is a forty-four-square-mile pluvial lake whose parched clay and silt surface is renewed every year in a cycle of rainwater and desert winds that leaves it as smooth and as hard as glass. To Arnold, the lake bed was a self-repairing runway under reliably clear skies, both of which meant reliably good flight conditions. And the area’s isolation from major cities also meant protection from prying eyes.

  Early one late summer morning in 1933, two men from the Automobile Club of Southern California and two army personnel in civilian clothing accompanied Arnold on a trip out to Muroc. They arrived at six o’clock and woke the town’s one resident, who ran both
the general store and the filling station. Posing as members of the Auto Club, the visitors inquired about travel routes in the area. Through a string of profanities and abuse about the Auto Club’s chosen time of arrival, the man answered Arnold’s questions about the desert environment and land ownership. When the group returned to March Field just east of Los Angeles that afternoon they began searching for titles to the land, most of which turned out to be owned by the U.S. Government. In September, at almost no cost to the American taxpayers and before he had secured the legal title to the land, Arnold established the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range, a training site for the Army Air Corps’ bombers and fighters.

  The flight facilities at Muroc had become permanent during the Second World War. In July of 1942, the Muroc Army Air Base was built to host combat flight crews, and soon B-24 bombers and P-38 pursuit planes were tearing through the desert sky and dropping practice bombs on targets on the desert floor. It wasn’t long before more planes arrived. Fast-paced wartime developments quickly overwhelmed the Army Air Force facilities at Wright Field in Ohio and moved to the remote desert, a perfect place to put top secret aircraft through qualification and safety testing. Soon, a second site six miles from Muroc was established, also on Rogers Dry Lake. A wooden hangar and basic facilities were built first, and then on October 1 a turbojet, a Bell XP-59A Airacomet, took off from the lake bed. As pilots put the first American fighter jets through their paces in the desert skies, they found that the expansive and reliably flat lake beds surrounding Muroc offered a welcome safe haven to pilots in distress; if they couldn’t make it back to Rogers, one of the smaller surrounding dry lake beds was a life-saving option. The desert airfield was also a perfect spot to test new and experimental aircraft.

  Toward the end of the Second World War, developments in aviation had run almost parallel to developments in rocketry, with jet-powered aircraft slowly replacing propeller planes in combat, though they had appeared late in the war. The first had been the German Messerschmitt Me-262 that debuted in July 1942. This had been followed two years later by the American-made Lockheed P-80A Shooting Star in January 1944. It was clear that, like rockets, these new jet airplanes were becoming state of the art and would play a vital role in future wars. And like any new technology, the jets brought a host of problems to the forefront, specifically the problem of air compressibility at speeds approaching the speed of sound. This was exactly the problem Hugh Dryden had spent the bulk of his career researching with the Bureau of Standards in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Compressibility was a phenomenon known to scientists well before it became a problem for aviation and was inextricably linked to the speed of sound. In the seventeenth century, artillery tests had been done with an observer standing a known distance from a cannon, measuring the time delay between a flash of light and the sound of the cannonball escaping the barrel. These tests revealed that sound travels at about 1,140 feet per second. But this method was imprecise, and the figure was disputed until 1943 when twenty-seven American leaders in aerodynamics met at the NACA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Among the attendees were Dryden, Theodore von Kármán, and John Stack, an aerodynamicist from the NACA Langley Memorial Laboratory. It was Stack who raised the issue of the speed of sound as something that would soon become a problem for aircraft manufacturers building faster vehicles. Without taking into account all the variables, including the heating properties of air and density at different altitudes, Stack said, available data wasn’t complete enough to determine the true speed of sound. Dryden offered a workaround, suggesting they mathematically round up the average measurements for a starting value. The committee ultimately agreed and settled on 1,117 feet per second as the speed of sound at sea level where the atmosphere is thickest.

  Regardless of altitude, a vehicle traveling at or near the speed of sound through the atmosphere will experience shock waves, a discovery that also predates aviation. Nineteenth-century physicist Ernst Mach studied the supersonic flow of gases using a shadowgraph. His photographs showed a bullet traveling supersonically with a clear shock wave in front of it and another trailing behind it. It was the first physical evidence that sound, a mechanical wave that vibrates the air molecules through which it travels, compresses those air molecules that can’t get out of the way fast enough. Mach’s research led to the measurements that bear his name; a Mach number is the ratio of the speed of an object traveling through a gas to the speed of sound in that gas.

  The same shock waves that Mach’s photographs revealed create an extremely unstable environment for an aircraft. It is possible for some parts of an airplane to travel at the speed of sound while others do not. In aviation, the challenges of compressibility were first seen with the tips of propeller blades. Though propeller-driven planes flew well below the speed of sound, the combined movement of a propeller’s rotation and the airplane moving forward through the air meant that the tips of the blades moved supersonically. The tips met the resistance of the shock waves, rendering the propeller less efficient and effectively slowing the aircraft. It was clear as early as the mid-1920s that the effects of compressibility could quickly become extremely troublesome and noticeably degrade an airplane’s overall performance.

  The problem became more complicated as planes became streamlined, started flying faster, and their propeller engines were replaced by jet engines. As the sound waves traveling in front of an airplane built up, the air flowing over the wing reached supersonic speeds before the air flowing underneath the wing did. The uneven shock waves buffeted airplanes, inducing structural failure and loss of flight control, which ultimately claimed pilots’ lives. But without a fundamental understanding of the physical features of the air flow that was causing this unstable environment, engineers were stumped on how to solve the problem. Most troublesome was the transonic range, the range encompassing speeds just below and just above the speed of sound, roughly between Mach 0.8 and Mach 1.08 where the buffeting effects of the uneven airflow are most pronounced and dangerous for a pilot.

  Engineers suspected that once an airplane was flying supersonically it would be stable, but it would have to reach supersonic speeds first, breaking through the compressed shock waves in the process. This became known as the so-called sound barrier. The myth that the sound barrier is a physical wall in the sky is rooted in a 1935 sensationalist headline. While giving an interview about high speed flight experiments, British aerodynamicist W. F. Hilton used a graphic representation of air drag on an airfoil, an aerodynamic object designed to generate lift, to explain the challenge of transonic flight to the reporter. Hilton showed on the graph how the density of the air molecules building up against the wing shot upward to create what looked like a wall. The next morning’s headlines coined the term the sound barrier, putting the idea of a physical barrier in the minds of people around the world. Engineers of course knew the sonic wall was just an engineering problem, but it was nevertheless a type of barrier that needed to be broken.

  The challenge of figuring out how to fly supersonically was made more difficult by inadequate wind tunnel data because contemporary wind tunnels couldn’t replicate transonic speeds. Air molecules build up inside a wind tunnel the same way they do in front of a moving airplane, bouncing off the walls of the enclosed space and distorting the air flow. The data engineers gathered was more or less useless, and without wind tunnel data it would be impossible for designers to figure out how to build an airplane that could safely fly supersonically. Rockets were routinely flying faster than sound, but their trajectories essentially replicated that of an artillery shell. Controlled, piloted aviation was at an impasse until an airplane could break the sound barrier.

  It was Stack, the aerodynamicist from Langley, who first spearheaded a program to develop a research airplane to take on compressibility by flying supersonically. By the summer of 1943, he and a small cohort from Langley had worked out the basic design details of a supersonic research aircraft. The Stack design called for a small, turbojet-powered airplane ca
pable of taking off under its own power from a runway before reaching a top speed of Mach 1, the speed of sound. What was more, the aircraft was designed to fly supersonically without compromising its ability to fly safely and steadily at subsonic speeds during takeoff and landing. To gather the necessary data, the aircraft would also carry a substantial payload of scientific instruments for measuring the aerodynamic and flight dynamic behavior at near-sonic speeds. And it wasn’t meant to be a one-off investigatory flight. Stack envisioned the aircraft first probing the low end of the transonic compressibility regime before flying incrementally faster and attempting to fly supersonically. For Stack, a regimented and measured approach was best.

  While the NACA had the knowledge and means to develop this Mach 1 research aircraft, only the military had the money to foot the bill. Fortuitously, the military was also interested in investigating supersonic flight. It wasn’t hard to imagine the benefits of having supersonic fighter airplanes as part of the United States’ aerial arsenal, which also meant training pilots to fly supersonically. The prospect of experimental aircraft with military applications led to a culture at Langley where fliers were trained as test-pilot engineers specifically for these research programs.

  On the last day of November in 1944, Bob Woods stopped by Ezra Kotcher’s office at Wright Field in Ohio. Woods, an aeronautical engineer who had cut his teeth in the field working at the NACA’s Langley Memorial Laboratory in the late 1920s, had partnered with Lawrence D. Bell in 1935 to form the Bell Aircraft Corporation. Kotcher, at the time, was a senior aeronautic engineer at the Army Air Force’s Air Materiel Command. The men chatted informally before the conversation turned to business. Kotcher told Woods that the Army Air Force was interested in building a dedicated research aircraft with the help of the NACA. It would be nonmilitary, not something to be mass produced. Instead, it would be a small run of three aircraft very specifically engineered to fly faster than the speed of sound and return data in the process. This aircraft would doubtlessly inform the next generation of military fighters, but it would itself be purely a research vehicle. If Bell was interested in building it, Kotcher told Woods, the contract for this experimental plane was his. Woods accepted the challenge on the spot.