Breaking the Chains of Gravity Page 14
CHAPTER EIGHT
Higher and Faster
In 1841, an act of Parliament transferred some twenty-eight acres of land from the grounds of London’s Kensington Palace to the Commissioners of Woods and Forests. The idea was to develop the land and turn it into housing for high-profile tenants, the revenue from the lease of which would go to maintaining and improving other royal gardens. The commissioners’ plan for the land centered around a broad avenue seventy feet wide called the Queen’s Road that would connect Kensington High Street with Uxbridge Road. The remaining land would be divided into thirty-three plots for detached and semidetached houses. Each plot would be leased on a ninety-nine-year term beginning on Lady Day 1842 to those willing to develop houses valued at at least three thousand pounds to attract wealthy occupants. The revenue from this proposal would be significant; if all thirty-three plots were let for the minimum rent, each estate would bring in twenty-three hundred pounds per year. Hopeful lessees eager to develop the land were asked to submit building plans to the commissioners first to ensure they met certain conditions, including a pledge that the house be ready for habitation within two years of the lease being granted and that the house include ornamental gardens, boundary walls, and iron gates that could allow passage for carriages.
Once the British Treasury authorized the commissioners’ plan in January 1842, existing buildings on the land were razed and construction began on the Queen’s Road. In July, Samuel West Strickland leased the first land, three adjoining plots along Uxbridge Road. The following September, John Marriott Blashfield secured a lease for twenty plots. Days later, he submitted the plans, elevations, and specifications of his first house, number 8, to the commissioners. The architect, Owen Jones, had incorporated a considerable amount of internal and external ornamentation into his design, and when number 8 was completed in 1846 its moresque, garish enrichments and expansive plain front gave it an exotic quality better suited to a Black Sea resort. It was on the whole somewhat at odds with the Victorian and Edwardian mansions that were slowly taking shape along the avenue.
Number 8 remained unoccupied until March 1852 when Mrs. Caroline Murray bought the house for sixty-three hundred pounds. Finding it far too large, she built an extension on the house’s south side then divided it into two units and leased the northern half to barrister and Recorder of London Mr. Russell Gurney in 1854. Mrs. Murray and Mr. Gurney were in good company. By the end of the nineteenth century, the area was second to none in terms of attractiveness of surroundings, and, renamed Kensington Palace Gardens, was home to bankers and leaders in the world of finance.
Number 8 Kensington Palace Gardens was in a state of disrepair in July 1940 when it became the headquarters of the London office of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center. Known colloquially as the London Cage, the once opulent estate served as a temporary home for former Nazis and German prisoners of war subject to harsh interrogations at the hands of British officers. The leader of the London Cage was Alexander Scotland, head of the Prisoner of War Interrogation Section of the Intelligence Corps. It was here, into Scotland’s hands, that Walter Dornberger was sent like a lamb to a sacrificial altar just weeks before Wernher von Braun arrived in the United States.
Von Braun and Dornberger both had arrived at the Bavarian ski resort at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in May 1945 for interrogation by the Allies. But while von Braun was taken by the Americans and asked to draft a list of men to accompany him to the United States under Operation Overcast and Project Paperclip, Dornberger was among eighty-five Germans taken by the British to assist in Operation Backfire, a British program to evaluate the V-2, interrogate related German personnel, and launch recovered rockets across the North Sea. None of the British officers told the Germans where they were going and what they were doing, so it was with some trepidation that eighty-four of them left Garmisch-Partenkirchen in a convoy of six army trucks. The Germans were split into two groups, each serving as a means to check facts against the other, with the exception of Dornberger. The program’s former leader was isolated for fear that he would convince his men not to work with the British and ultimately sabotage their V-2 program.
By August, the British had amassed all the equipment needed for Operation Backfire, including a nearly complete set of V-2 manufacturing drawings. The assembly and checkout phase was getting underway in anticipation of the program’s launch phase that would see rockets flying for data-gathering purposes. But Dornberger was no longer involved. He had been sent to London, ostensibly for further interrogation, but in reality he was taken in as a prisoner of war at a camp for high-ranking German officials. Wearing his camp-issued light brown uniform with no insignia save “PW” emblazoned in white letters on the back of his tunic, Dornberger was then sent to London Cage, where Scotland was waiting. Because Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler was nowhere to be found, Scotland told Dornberger he would be tried in his stead for the crime of launching rockets against England. Dornberger protested, arguing that he had had nothing to do with the German Army’s decision to launch the V-2s, that he was only a scientist and hadn’t participated in the decisions to deploy the V-2 as a weapon. But Dornberger’s arguments fell on Scotland’s deaf ears. The scientist’s fate would be decided by the cabinet and the chief British prosecutor. With a trial looming before him, Dornberger was eventually transferred to the Bridgend Prisoner of War camp in South Wales where he spent two years theoretically contemplating the atrocities he had committed against Britain.
In 1947, Dornberger was released and managed to emigrate to the United States. He served the U.S. Air Force as an adviser on guided missile development before moving into industry for a job with Bell Aircraft in 1950. Working with a peacetime army and a contractor whose interests went beyond building weapons, Dornberger rehashed the idea of the antipodal bomber, the system Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt had failed to develop during or after the war. He’d gotten his hands on one of the couple’s reports about the rocket drive for a long-range bomber, and now, in peacetime, Dornberger proposed the concept as both a sophisticated weapons system and a research aircraft that could reach speeds of up to six thousand feet per second at altitudes between fifty and seventy-five miles. He twice tried to use the prospect of an antipodal bomber-turned-spacecraft program to court Wernher von Braun into leaving the U.S. Army to join him at Bell Aircraft. Bell, Dornberger alluded to his former colleague, could be the company that would build America’s first spaceplane for the U.S. Air Force. Tempted to be on the ground floor of America’s first steps into space, von Braun spent sleepless nights turning the decision over in his mind before ultimately deciding to stay the course with the U.S. Army. His team and the Redstone rocket they were building, he reasoned, had an equal chance of launching satellites into orbit. Besides, he felt a strong sense of responsibility for the group at the Redstone Arsenal and an unrelenting pull to develop the rockets and missiles he’d always wanted to build.
Von Braun may not have been convinced, but Dornberger found a sympathetic and willing collaborator in Robert Woods, Bell’s chief engineer. In a memo to the NACA dated January 8, 1952, Woods proposed a program that would build off the success of the X-1’s supersonic flight by delving deeper into the unknown challenges of hypersonic flight at speeds above Mach 5. Accompanying this memo was a letter from Dornberger outlining a detailed plan for Woods’s proposed program that included a test flight program into the ionosphere about 370 miles above the Earth. This research aircraft was a liquid fueled rocket plane, heavily inspired by the boost-glide profile of the Sänger antipodal bomber. The time was right, Dornberger said in the letter, for the aviation industry to start looking at a vehicle that could carry men into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and possibly into space. But the German engineer’s vision ultimately went farther to a future where rocket-powered gliders would shrink the world.
“Ultra planes” were Dornberger’s imagined inevitable commercial spin-off from developing the antipodal bomber, a way to apply the basic
principles of guided missiles to commercial aviation. Born in a world before heavier-than-air flight, Dornberger had seen, within his lifetime, bare-bones wood-and-canvas airplanes taking short hops just feet above the ground replaced by sleek fighter jets and experimental aircraft that could fly faster than the speed of sound. Commercial aviation had flourished into a viable business in the same time frame, carrying passengers around the world in luxurious cabins with unparalleled views. Dornberger reasoned that rocket propulsion would follow a similar path, developing into a commercially viable technology over the course of a half century. Nothing would replace propeller planes for short hops like those between cities in the Continental United States, but ultra planes would use rocket-propelled flight to drastically shorten the travel time between major international cities like San Francisco, London, Calcutta in India, and Sydney in Australia.
Dornberger’s ultra planes were a two-part vehicle consisting of a passenger-carrying glider mounted on the upper fuselage of a booster. Both vehicles would have multiple pilots who would use their vehicles’ flat bottoms and large triangular wings to increase their gliding range. Before launch, the glider would slide into place along rails on the booster’s back. When the two vehicles were sitting horizontally like a traditional airplane, it would look like the booster was giving the glider a piggyback ride. Once mated, the booster-glider stack would be flipped on its end so their noses would be pointing skyward, an impressive and imposing black monolith towering above the ground. The upright vehicles would be mounted on a launch platform sitting on rails. Once fueling was complete, the upright ultra plane would travel along the rails from the hangar through massive concrete passageways he called canyons to the large, circular concrete launch area. It was a system reminiscent of the one Dornberger had pioneered at Peenemünde where upright V-2s were transported by rail to their launch platform.
Ultra plane passengers, meanwhile, would arrive at the airport like they would for any other flight, checking in before proceeding to their assigned gate. Only the gate for an ultra plane flight wouldn’t be a typical one with a simple stairway allowing passengers to board their plane. Passengers would have to take a bus from the terminal to a point along the canyon leading to the launch area. From there, they would take an elevator twenty feet down into the launch crater walls where a gantry would grant them passage into the glider’s cabin. At other levels, similar gantries would allow maintenance crews access to all levels of the booster and the glider for preflight checks.
Passengers would take their assigned seats inside the main cabin area that would be further divided into smaller units. The seats in these cabins wouldn’t be fixed like in a traditional airplane. They would be designed to rotate freely like rocking chairs to keep passengers sitting in a familiar upright position throughout the flight, keeping airsickness and disorientation to a minimum. But this was as far as onboard comforts would go. The cost of fuel for a rocket-powered flight would make carrying excess cargo like flight attendants and inflight meals impossible. And besides, the flights would be so short there would hardly be time for a proper meal service.
But the view would more than make up for the lack of inflight amenities. In keeping with the commercial aviation standard of affording all passengers the most spectacular views possible, the glider’s cabin would feature small windows fitted with pilot-controlled sunscreens to protect passengers’ eyes from the unfiltered sunlight in the thin upper atmosphere. They wouldn’t have cocktails or white linen tablecloths, but passengers would be treated to the awesome sights of the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth stretching out below them.
With both vehicles fueled and loaded and passengers safely seated in the glider with their seat belts fastened, the ultra plane would finish its railway journey into its circular concrete launch pit. Once in position, the glider pilot would rotate the vehicle so its wings faced any oncoming wind, a simple maneuver that would limit excessive turbulence in the first stages of the ultra plane’s climb. The booster’s five rocket engines would ignite first to deliver 760,000 pounds of thrust, treating passengers to a mighty roar in spite of the craft’s structure and fuel tanks absorbing some of the sound waves. And it would be an uncomfortable ride as well. As the ultra plane left the Earth, passengers would have the sensation of getting heavier and heavier in their seats. Feeling one quarter more than their normal body weight just after launch, the g-forces would increase during the ascent until they would feel themselves weighing three times their normal body weight.
However uncomfortable the high g-forces were, they wouldn’t last long. Just two minutes after launch, it would be time for staging. The glider pilot would activate a release mechanism, allowing the small vehicle to slide off the rails on the booster’s upper fuselage. Momentum would carry the glider higher while the booster’s pilots would guide their larger vehicle to a runway landing back at the airport where it would be towed to the hangar, mated with a new glider, and prepared for another flight.
The glider, meanwhile, would continue toward its destination. Once clear of the booster, the pilot would ignite the glider’s three rocket engines for three minutes of powered flight, propelling the small passenger vehicle more than 140,000 feet above the Earth at speeds faster than eighty-four hundred miles per hour. Then the engines would cut out. Inside the cabin, passengers would go from feeling as though they weighed three and a half times their normal body weight to feeling just three-quarters of their normal weight, floating ever so slightly in their seats. The total powered portion of the flight from launch to staging through to the glider’s engine shutdown would last just four and a half minutes. The remainder of the flight would be a silent, unpowered, gliding descent. Passengers could sit back, relax, and enjoy the sensation of lightness while taking in the stars shining against the blackness of space before watching the curving Earth rush up toward them.
Far too soon for passengers entranced by the view, it would be time for landing. Still unpowered, the glider’s pilots would bring the passenger plane down softly on a runway at the destination airport. Now sitting horizontally, passengers would deplane using a familiar rolling staircase brought flush against the fuselage and walk right down onto the tarmac. A shuttle bus would transport them to the airport’s terminal where they could catch a connecting flight or begin their vacation.
The first ultra plane flights in Dornberger’s imagined future would be, by the sheer cost of the venture, reserved for the wealthy and social elite, but eventually intercontinental travel would be dominated by rocket planes. Airports in select major cities would serve as hubs for ultra planes, effectively shrinking the world for those eager for international travel. And this would be just the beginning. Dornberger expected these commercial suborbital rocket flights would eventually prove to be just the first step in man’s departure from the planet. By making the world more accessible, he anticipated, more people would be inclined to start looking beyond the Earth and out into space. A commercial demand for large boosters for ultra plane flights would also force the technology to develop, eventually parlaying into spin-off technologies such as boosters capable of launching probes to other planets.
Though Dornberger saw his ultra planes as a natural progression for aviation once rocket propulsion became commonplace, the flights he imagined would demand significant technological advances beyond existing rocket power. Before any hypersonic passenger planes could fly, questions about supersonic flight needed answers. Aerodynamic heating was foremost among these problems. The friction these ultra planes would experience while gliding hypersonically through the increasingly thickening atmosphere from near space would heat the fuselage to dangerously high temperatures. Some new cooling method or even some new material would have to be developed before an ultra plane could fly. There were unknowns about the vehicle’s structure, too. The gliders would be traveling as fast as Mach 20. Less than a decade after Chuck Yeager broke Mach 1, no one was sure how stable an aircraft would be flying twenty times the speed of
sound, nor how to design such an aircraft. If Dornberger’s vision for the future was going to come to pass, engineers would have to explore hypersonic flight first, and that meant more research aircraft and more advances to the state of the art of aviation.
Toward the end of 1953, almost two years after Woods proposed a hypersonic research program to the NACA accompanied by Dornberger’s pitch for an antipodal bomber-type vehicle, no pilot had managed to fly faster than Mach 2. There was no barrier to break at this speed as there was with Mach 1; flying twice the speed of sound was a psychological goal rather than an engineering one, though still an engineering challenge. The X-1 in which Yeager had broken the sound barrier remained the fastest aircraft at Edwards, but it was old technology and growing increasingly stale every day. Variants like the X-1A, however, helped the aircraft retain its starring position. This version was longer than the original X-1, featuring a bubble canopy for better visibility, larger fuel tanks, and a turbo-driven fuel pump that would allow the engine to operate at full power slightly longer. It was also known to be unstable at speeds above Mach 1.8, though Yeager was sure he could push it above Mach 2 and was determined to secure this record as well. But he wasn’t the only one. Now a veteran at Edwards with multiple rocket flight under his belt, Scott Crossfield knew he could reach Mach 2 in the Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket, another rocket-powered vehicle owned by the U.S. Navy. It wasn’t designed to fly at Mach 2, but Crossfield had spent enough time in the Skyrocket to know he could push it to this speed record, as Yeager had the X-1A. The two brash pilots were locked in a contest, each vying to be the first to fly at twice the speed of sound.
As an NACA test pilot, however, Crossfield wasn’t in the business of setting records. His job was to fly engineering test flights while military pilots like Yeager set speed records. If he was going to take the Skyrocket to Mach 2, he would have to take his appeal all the way to the top, to the NACA’s director, Hugh Dryden. It was Dryden who had put the speed limit on Crossfield during his checkout flights in the Skyrocket, preventing him from pushing to Mach 2. It would be a navy pilot, Dryden dictated, who would be the one to push the airplane to its speed limits. But Crossfield’s determination prevailed, and he decided to take his case to an intermediary.