War Is Boring

X-20. Air Force photo.

During the 1950′s and 1960′s, the high noon of postwar florescence, Sputnik made space the place to be, and once NASA was established as a purely civilian effort, the Air Force wanted its own space program. Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff and its movie adaptation illuminate how the piloted spaceplanes under development ultimately gave way to the ballistic capsules needed for the moon program.

North American’s X-15, first flown in 1957, won its Air Force pilots astronauts’ wings outside of NASA’s star-studded corps. Its successor, the X-20 “Dyna-Soar” (for “dynamic soaring”, a very Space Age term) was to have been America’s first reusable spaceship, taking to the skies 15 years before the Space Shuttle’s first flight.

The rocket-powered hypersonic glider concept caught the imaginations of airmen when Dr. Eugene Sanger joined other German scientists in the USA after World War II. Sanger had developed his “Silverbird” hypersonic bomber concept into engineering drawings before the Reich died, and his ideas were pursued for decades.

Silverbird was a huge, manned rocket glider with a heavy bomb load launched from a giant rocket sled; its shape allowed its pilot to “skip” the vehicle off the Earth’s atmosphere, very like a stone skipping off a pond’s surface, and thus achieve tremendous ranges. A Silverbird launched from Germany could have easily dropped its weapons on Chicago or Los Angeles. The vehicle and pilot would have landed safely in Japanese-controlled territory.

After the war, this ultimate “prompt global strike” platform was hotly but quietly pursued by Bell, Douglas, Republic and North American, and by 1960 the Air Force and winning contractor Boeing had plans, prototypes and picture-perfect presentations in place.

Of course, the Soviets worked over the idea too, and got farther with it; the MiG-105 “Spiral” spaceplane was drop-tested, though not flown into space.

Even though the American aerospace industry was then at the height of its grand-scale pursuits, and our society was less risk-averse (or perhaps, less risk-aware), hindsight suggests the development costs of Dyna-Soar might have been rather high. A great many test pilots bought the farm in X-15s, SR-71s, XB-70s and other very-high-performance aircraft, and the Shuttle itself has had 14 crew losses. A black test program, under pressure to show results in the face of the Vietnam War, and one pushing the envelope in design and technique, may have produced some brilliant meteors and posthumous commendations.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara killed off the Dyna-Soar program in December 1963; the X-20 joined the nuclear-powered aircraft, the P6M SeaMaster and the B-70 bomber program in the Twilight Zone. In a true sign of our times, the piloted X-20′s quick response, orbital agility and wide range of black payloads are now being fullfilled by a drone, the X-37 [and by the civilian SpaceShipOne and Two -- ed.]. The X-37′s long-duration capability also carries forward the intents of Dyna-Soar’s replacement program: the Air Force’s MOL Manned Orbiting Laboratory. We’ll discuss this Vietnam-era military space station soon.

The long-running debate in civilian space circles over the relative merits of manned versus unmanned spaceflight appears to have been settled over at the Pentagon. Test pilots, who could once aspire to astronauts’ wings, now wonder whether there’s a seat left anywhere up there. There will always be need for men and women to fly high and far; they may simply fly virtually.

(The indefatigable Scott Lowther of the blog Up-Ship has rescued and compiled some actual engineering drawings of Dyna-Soar. Mark Wade’s Encyclopedia Astronautica is so good that NASA sent National Geographic there in search of historical material. And for some dandy eye-candy, see Dan Roam’s recreations of what might have
been.)