After the The Moon Shot a Critical look at NASA And Innovation an essay By Esteban Erik Stipnieks column available for syndication (210)829-7591 or run links to this. admin@ausaboxing.com contact me!
There has been much about the 40th anniversary of man's first steps on the moon. They represent a triumph for mankind. In the history of NACA later NASA they are a bright light and high point. So the talk has gone to additional space exploration and the calls for a Mars mission. At this point I think before we continue to Mars we must first take a long critical look at the agency tasked to get us there. The saying is "Fool me once shame you fool me twice shame on me." History is pock marked with monumental failures of NASA/NACA. The triumphs of the agency are few and far between.
It has been said that aviation is hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. The history of NACA/NASA are decades and years of folly some of it with real fatal consequences punctuated by isolated moments of triumph. Yes I am attacking the very agency that sent us to the moon.
Clive Irving in his book Wide Body deals with the issue of NACA and its role from the 1920s to the 1940s. In the book he detailed how Max Munk was imported to the US after the war...and how created the formula that rendered Wind Tunnel data useful. Basically when you stick a scale model of an airplane in a wind tunnel you do not get the same behavior of airplane in actual flight till your wind tunnel compresses the air to the scale of the airplane. This was a flash of his intuition that Clive detailed and in a single stroke he gave the aerospace engineers of the world their most valuable tool. Now naturally you think NACA would embrace him as its director. The book details how Max Munk was literally shoved out of agency in Clive Irving's as alien body.
The kicking out of Max Munk (The man who gave us the wind tunnel) as isolated incident is indeed a black mark. We have the second real incident that shows that NACA lapsed into group think and once again closed its eyes and ears to a revolution in the making. In the 1940s aviation which had made much progress ran into its next barrier....that was behavior of air as an airplane approached the speed of sound. Did NACA point the way blaze the trail or did it stand in the way of the very innovation that would tame the demons of transonic flight? It stood in the way. The swept wing as Clive Irving recounts was introduced at the Volta Conference in 1935. Americans being pragmatic lacking imagination well were not to interested in it.....believe that airplanes would actually get that fast. They did not anticipate the advent of the jet engine or realize what WWII would do. In less then 4 years what America ignored would be needed....enter Robert Jones. It was a radical thought....applying a mathematical formula used on airship hulls to a wing. The math and its application pointed the same direction that was first mentioned in Volta 1935. If you rotate the tips of the wings back you have a drag reduction and better chance of controllability of the wing and the airplane. Was this idea accepted? No dives had been killing pilots in the P-38 transonic flight was now readily taking the lives of pilots. The approach that NACA had been taking was not without partial merit. The P-51 with its laminar flow wing offered a speed gain. For the lower end of the transonic zone NACA wing and concepts would have merit and would have a positive impact for business jets on the lower end of the speed range the wing would indeed work. The swept wing in the end would be the wing that would change the world. Robert Jones fought a long uphill battle. In the end NACA was forced to deal with the fact he was right.
Now I am about to take you on a rabbit trail but the rabbit trail proves the point. The evidence is growing and credible that Chuck Yeager may not have been the first man across the sound barrier and back that lived to tell about it. Even Air and Space What is not in doubt is the moving tail plane allowed the X-1 to be controllable that was discussed not by two air force officers on a NACA program. There is evidence that the F-86 which was equipped with a moving vertical stabilizer was first across the sound barrier. There is much evidence about this from multiple sources source 1 ,source 2 , Source 3, the article posted by Air and Space Magazine lending credibility to this has since disappeared off the web! Either way you slice it you have the USAF, or North American taming the sound barrier not NACA. The Swept wing was proven to be the key to transonic flight the B-47 a product of aerospace company and the military is considered the real prototype for the modern airliner. Once again a major break through had gone on beyond NACA/NASA.
White, Grissom, Chaffe incinerated alive as a result of a shoddy short circuit, Michael J Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis dead in an accident that Joe Sutter as a part of a white house investigation team deemed an organizational failure finally we have the last 7 Rick D Husband, William McCool, Michael P Anderson, llan Ramon, Kalapana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark. The tragic thread of all these accidents that lead to the deaths of heroes is that they were all preventable. The Morton Thiokol engineer who did not want the Challenger to be launched found himself in the exact same position shut by group think that Max Munk and Robert Jones had found themselves in years previous. This time though the fatal consequences of the action were readily fatal. Apollo 1 and Colombia were testimonies of blind faith with tragic consequences in the book Moon Shot discusses the Go Fever of NASA. People knew of the falling ice from the external fuel tank but since the shuttle had gotten away with it so many times it was assumed not to be a danger. The shock at Southwest Research was real when they hit carbon carbon panel with the foam. The Colombia crew was dead the moment that ice hit the wing panel. It is only very recently that the fleet was grounded again due to ice falling from the external tank and hitting the shuttle.
Astronauts and even ex shuttle engineers have turned on the design. The capsule design perched above the rocket with the solid rocket escape engine offered the best chance for survival and put the most vulnerable part of the space craft above the falling ice, and in the safest place to be in the event of a catastrophic in launch explosion. A compelling argument could be made that once you had to attach an external tank, solid fuel boosters to a space plane the design should have been abandoned. Much of the Dyna Soar concept for launch had the crew compartment away from launch.
The United States has lead the world in aerospace design. NASA has had little to do with it. Where breakthroughs are made the military is more often then not a around. The Green revolution of flight inexorably has military ties in all aspects from the shape, to the engines and the control systems. The very technology that made the F-117 controllable made the 777 green. Burt Rutan took the very launch of the X-planes and utilized the very atmosphere the that makes the first phase of launch for space craft so troublesome and turned it into an asset with Space Ship 1. His mind is commercializing space with Richard Branson in the Virgin Galactic endeavor.
The USN has deliberately backed science before and was involved with exploration even in the 20th century. The Trieste exploration into the Challenger Deep was another feather the cap of this service. Lets face it the USAF blundered into some of the most successful research projects of aerospace history. The Navy played a key role in the development of solid fuel launch vehicles. Space has military implications from recon satellites to things that go boom. Lets face it the race to the moon can not be separated from beating the Soviets. Should a Mars mission be a Joint Navy, Air Force project? I think so. The military industrial complex has found a way to accommodate maverick geniuses that produce results. George Schairer , Tex Johnson , Kelly Johnson , and Ben Rich all were eccentric yet the amount of history driven by the men puts fiction to shame in terms of stretching credulity. Though they were civilians the projects they were involved in all shaped the world we know today. Burt Rutan is an heir to the their throne what they got on after two bicycle mechanics from Dayton Ohio. By looking carefully at the past you can see what worked. The military industrial complex has shaved the state art so far out repeatedly because in that world accountability is direct and harsh when it comes to safety and accomplishing the mission.
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