Return of the Hindenburg
Always on the verge of a seeming comeback, airships are back in the spotlight, touting new technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency recently announced funding for an innovative, ballast-free airship technology created by Aeros Aeronautical Systems, based outside Los Angeles. The Aeroscraft ML866's potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht's buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says.
It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. Other companies are planning their own first flights within the next few years. Each has a design that it promises will launch a new era of lighter-than-air transportation.
Read more from our friends at Popular Mechanics on Military.com.
-- Christian
The Poor Man's Stealth Detector
Details of a formerly secret project to defend Swedish airspace against stealthy cruise missiles using a radical but inexpensive radar system were revealed at a conference in Oslo this week. The Associative Aperture Synthesis Radar (AASR) was approaching the hardware-test stage when it was cancelled in 2000 after eight years of work -- because there was no imminent cruise-missile threat any more. It has only recently been declassified and this was one of the first open, formal briefings on the project.
The AASR was designed to take advantage of the principle that a target's bistatic radar cross section -- where the radar receiver and transmitter are in different places -- may be affected minimally or not at all by stealth measures aimed at conventional radars. In particular, it exploits the "shadow" RCS behind the target, which depends entirely on the target's geometrical cross-section. The radar was also designed to operate in the UHF band where radar absorbent material (RAM) is less effective.
Developer Hans Hellsten of Saab Microwave Systems told the conference that the AASR used a number of novel techniques. Each transmitter would transmit on stepped frequencies so that receivers could tell where a signal came from. This made it possible to determine the length of the signal path, so that if a signal was picked up at several nodes it was possible to determine the target's location precisely.
One disadvantage: the transmitter and receiver had to be on opposite sides of the target, so it could not be detected until it had entered the defended airspace. To get around that problem and still intercept targets in a timely manner, Swedish planners expected to exploit the system's accuracy -- it could locate targets within 1.5 m -- and command-guide a high-speed missile on to the target.
But because the system used range rather than bearing to locate its targets, the antennas did not need to have accurate bearing resolution. Also, the system's use of UHF, its independence from target RCS and the fact that bistatic systems have long pulse times meant that the necessary power was modest.
The result was a price that caused sharp intakes of breath among the delegates. Each of the 900 nodes was expected to cost no more than 1 million Swedish kroner (about $156,000) and the entire system would be in the 1 billion kroner ($156 million) realm -- pretty much chickenfeed by defense standards.
Read more from our Aviation Week friends at Military.com.
-- Christian
Mine Threat to U.S. Ships?
A World War II mine was discovered and destroyed in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol as the U.S. destroyer Forest Sherman was entering the Ukrainian port. The incident occurred on August 9 as the Sherman -- an Aegis missile destroyer -- called at Sevastopol to conduct drills with the Ukrainian Navy.
The destroyer was about 500 yards from the floating mine when it was discovered. The mine was secured to prevent it from drifting into a ship and subsequently was detonated without causing any damage. The mine was estimated to weigh about 1,100 pounds and to contain up to 110 pounds of high explosives.
A half-century ago a similar (albeit larger) weapon sank a Soviet battleship in the worst disaster to befall the Red Navy. The dreadnought was the former Italian Conte di Cavour, which had been transferred to the Soviet Navy in 1949 as part of the division of Axis warships after World War II. Renamed Novorossysk, the battleship -- flagship of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet -- was anchored at Sevastopol. Early on October 29, 1955, the ship was wracked by a massive explosion, apparently caused by a World War II-era German mine.
Although moored only 1,000 feet from the shore, and with numerous other naval units nearby, the ship began to slowly sink to the shallow bottom. But the ship began to rotate and rolled over completely. The capsizing caused the death of 608 officers and enlisted men.
Subsequently 19 German-type mines were found in the general area where the ship had sunk although the area had been swept earlier. But some Soviet officials believed that the explosion was caused by Italian frogmen, who sank the ship to avenge her transfer to the Soviet Union. Others believed it was an internal explosion -- an act of sabotage.
The large loss of life was blamed on the incompetence of the ship’s commanding officer, the fleet commander, and others for their failure to take appropriate action to beach the ship. And, the loss of the Novorossysk caused the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov to be fired in November 1955. His first deputy, Admiral Serge G. Gorshkov, was appointed to succeed him. Gorshkov would serve as head of the Soviet Navy for 29 years.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials state that the destroyer Sherman was never in danger from the mine.
-- Norman Polmar
Future Bat-Tech for Bots
They’re an enigma of flight. Rats with wings that guide themselves through the air with chirps and clicks. And now the Air Force is taking notice to see how the mysteries of a bat’s ability to fly can help make better aircraft in the future.
The Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender has an outstanding piece today on a $6 million research program at Brown University intended to uncover the mechanics and science of chiroptera flight for human (or robotic) applications...
From the Globe:
Research so far has found that bats can carry up to 50 percent of their weight and execute airborne maneuvers that would make a bird or plane fall out of the sky. Moreover, scientists believe the hundreds of tiny sensors covering bat wings could be the key to their most impressive airborne maneuvers, a discovery that engineers could replicate with networks of sensors and computers on military aircraft.
If researchers can unlock the secrets of bat flight, it could have wide-reaching implications, according to Air Force and Brown officials. They say the project has the potential to revolutionize aircraft design and could lead to the creation of smaller, more efficient military air vehicles that can maneuver in tight spaces as well as gather intelligence and airlift supplies through forbidding terrain.
"The Air Force envisions a future in which they have lots of autonomous air vehicles that can take on different kinds of missions and that don't have pilots," said Sharon Swartz, an evolutionary biologist at Brown who is helping run the project. "We know a lot about the aerodynamics of large things moving very fast. There is almost nothing known yet about the basic physics of bat flight."
Unlike birds or insects, whose wings are comparatively rigid, bats have wings with more than two dozen independent joints, much like a human hand. That allows them to manipulate the thin, flexible membrane that covers the wings in ways that can generate more lift or greatly reduce drag.
Surfaces of bat wings also curve more than a bird's -- providing greater lift for less energy -- while their extraordinary flexibility allows them to make a 180-degree turn in less than half their wingspan, a radius impossible for any bird or existing plane, according to the initial findings.
The Air Force is particularly interested in how pregnant female bats can fly throughout the gestation period, even though the feat can amount to hauling half their body weight. Understanding the physics of supporting so much weight in flight could help aircraft designers dramatically increase the payloads of current aircraft models, project officials believe.
Bats, researchers have found, can fly with badly damaged wings and show no discernible changes in flight control -- an intriguing discovery that could have drastic implications for aircraft flight safety...
...bats are physically different from other animals that fly; their thin, membrane-like wings are complex appendages with joints similar to a human elbow and wrist. During flight, they have precise control over the shape of the wing, making them much more maneuverable than birds or insect wings.
This is especially true in caves and forests -- difficult, obstacle-filled environments in which conventional flying machines normally cannot operate.
Researchers, meanwhile, have begun to understand how bats can turn at extremely steep angles without losing lift or stalling during flight.
"After 10 or 15 degrees of tilt an aircraft just stops catastrophically and plummets," said Swartz. The bats, she said, can tilt their wings at angles as steep as 60 degrees with little or no stall. Part of the reason, she believes, is that bats can stretch the wing membrane in midair, expanding its surface area and increasing lift, something bird or aircraft wings cannot do.
Those same characteristics appear to enable bats to fly with relatively large loads, a feature being studied by inserting saline into the laboratory bats to temporarily make them heavier than normal.
Some bats in the laboratory have lost upwards of 25 percent of their wings "before we can pick up with the naked eye any difference in their flight," according to Swartz.
The project is also just beginning to study what appear to be sensory cells, described as tiny hairs, that cover the wing surfaces and may also help explain why bats are so adaptable in flight. Neuroscientists at the University of Maryland have been enlisted by Brown to study what role the sensors play in sending instructions to the bat's brain to make wing adjustments to compensate for changes in air flow.
-- Christian
Hope for Amputees
The global war on terror – particularly the war in Iraq – has created a record number of military amputees. The horrific effects of improvised explosive devices have wreaked havoc on our troops, tearing bodies apart far more than they kill.
The military’s medical professionals have done amazing work on the development of prosthetics and rehabilitation, enabling many troops to return to duty where in the past they would have been medically retired.
A video making its way around the internet introduces an intriguing new entry onto the list of cutting-edge solutions for those who’ve lost a limb. It is unclear where this presentation was made, but scuttlebutt is Segway inventor Dean Kamen’s DEKA Research and Development Company has built a “cyborg” arm with near-human dexterity and sensitivity.
DT is tracking down details, but as this grainy video shows, the arm could revolutionize orthopedic medicine and dramatically improve the quality of life of our wounded veterans.
(Gouge: BH)
-- Christian
WWI Mine-Mashers to Iraq
The armed services are spending billions and billions to figure out fancy new ways to stop improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But the latest trick is an oldie -- dating back to World War I -- and couldn't be less high tech.
The contraptions are called mine rollers -- sets of wheels mounted in front of a vehicle, basically. When they roll over a mine or a pressure-activated IED, the wheels trigger the bomb. Because the vehicle is some distance behind the rollers, much of the bomb blast wave does not reach the vehicle, dramatically reducing the damage. And the vehicle lives to see another day. The Marine Corps just bought 150 sets from General Dynamics, according to Defense Industry Daily.
This idea sounds glaringly obvious. So you might wonder why it took the military more than 3 years to put the rollers up. In fact, the idea of a mine roller originated in 1918, to help nascent tanks deal with the anti-tank mines of that era. Many of the earliest IEDs in Iraq were built with anti-tank mines. Why didn't anybody in the Army Engineer School, for instance, make the connection?
Chalk some of it up to military bureaucracy. When it comes to mine-clearance, combat engineers and explosive ordnance disposal techs sometimes have overlapping lines of responsibility. (Which helps fuel an often-bitter rivalry.) At times, who exactly is supposed to develop bomb- and mine-fighting gear has been a blurry question, as well. The Counter-IED Task Force is now supposed to be in charge. But we'll see.
There are several legitimate concerns with the mine rollers that I am not going to mention here. However, my answer to these concerns are: If the insurgents do that, it would make their IEDs more detectable. Moreover, the standoff will interfere with aiming.
A friend and I were working on a similar concept, a Humvee roller attachment. However, we could not find a machinist to build our prototype. Now that I am deployed, we could not continue our commercial venture. One feature of our design was that it was telescoping, meaning that we can vary the distance of the rollers to the vehicle. We can change the distance to respond to changes in IED tactics. Maybe General Dynamics will incorporate the feature into their next run of mine rollers, too.
-- Jimmy Wu
Vintage Looks at Future Wars
Oooh oooh. Just when I thought I had hit the retro-futuro motherlode, along comes Tales of Future Past.
The site has a ton of vintage looks at tomorrow, including classic magazine stories of inflatoplanes, hovering Oldsmobiles, and kitchen computers.
But the stuff that'll get Defense Techies riled up is in the Future War section. Land battleships, anyone? (Note the farmhouse, about to be crushed.) Jumping jack artillery tower? Gyro destroyer? (Think Ferris Wheel, with guns, and you've got the right idea.)
"Predictions about the future seem to have a paradoxical quality about them. On the one hand, you see all sorts of articles and images showing a prosperous, peaceful people enjoying complex and interesting lives with all sorts of wonderful gadgets. On the other hand, you find gleeful descriptions of the most incredible means of wielding death that an adolescent mind can conjure," David Zondy, the site's founder, notes. "Come to think of it, that ended up being not very far from the truth. The late 20th century saw the West, and many parts of the rest of the world, enjoying incredible levels of prosperity with some of the most wonderful technological toys ever made, yet at the same time the entire world had a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over its head."
UPDATE 10:25 AM: Modern Mechanix just posted the full text of a 1934 story, "Is Aerial Warfare Doomed?"
(Big ups: Chris)
"Yesterday's Tomorrow, Today"
I have a new favorite blog. Modern Mechanix combs through old science magazines to pick out some of the goofier retro visions of the future. (There are some seriously awesome ads, too.)
Behold the baby-sized gas mask, the real-life hair helmet, and the magic house that makes its own weather.
The site (motto: "Yesterday's tomorrow, today") is good for more than just a laugh, though. It also serves as a reminder to those of us writing about technology that the gear you fall in love with today could be the stuff you ridicule tomorrow.
Big Bucks for Giant Blimp
I can't figure it out, honestly, what's behind this blimp fetish of mine. Maybe it's because I dig retro visions of the techno-future -- from pneumatic subways to mobile homes on the Moon; blimps somehow feed into that. Maybe it's the idea of being lighter than air that grabs me.
Either way, I'm not alone. There are a bunch of other people in the Defense Department who share my obsession. And they are handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new fleet of military airships.
The latest, Defense Industry Daily tells us: a $149 million contract to Lockheed, to build a massive High Altitude Airship that will look out for ballistic missile launches.
The blimp will hover above the jet stream at an altitude of 65,000 feet for months at a time and will also have the ability to detect low-flying missiles that may have slipped underneath ground-based radars. Once operational, it will be an important early-detection element of the broader U.S. missile defense architecture. It may also add as a weather surveyor and telecom relay.
There are a number of challenges associated with an effort of this nature.
Solar cells and an advanced fuel cells that can deliver up to 500 kW must be developed to power the craft. An aerodynamic design and a control system must be developed to help keep the airship steady amid the high winds at that altitude, without consuming excessive power. Another important factor is determining how the airship would react to changing temperatures as the sun rises and sets every day, heating and cooling the helium. Then there's the major challenge of finding materials for the airship's skin that are capable of withstanding the extreme ultraviolet radiation at such high altitudes for extended periods without becoming brittle.
But this HAA is actually a little less ambitious than earlier designs. Before, the airship was supposed to be King Kong big, at 25 times the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Now, it's merely huge, at two-and-a-half Goodyears in length. Plans to power the airship with lasers seem to have also fallen by the wayside, for now.
If everything goes well, a prototype HAA should be ready to fly in 2010. I can't wait.
UPDATE 5:23PM: Via the Wonk, here's a presentation on "Advanced Concepts in Missile Defense." The HAA is in there, as well as a program for one interceptor with "multiple kill vehicles."
Retro-nukes
Dr. Arms Control Wonk here. Noah's running around today, so I've hijacked the blog for moment.
Retro fashions don't usually appeal to nuclear weapons designers, save for the odd Members Only jacket you spot on some poor refugee from the 1980s
So you might be surprised to find that uranium -- which fell out of favor with US nuclear weaponeers in the 1950s -- may be the hip Fall fashion in certain New Mexican locales.
Over at my blog, I've started a discussion about a story John Fleck broke in the subscription only Albuquerque Journal.
Bob Peurifoy, a retired Sandia executive, favors dumping plutonium weapons in favor of low-tech uranium designs. Actually, Peurifoy prefers the current US arsenal, but Congress says the weapons labs should relax Cold War design requirements to build new warheads that are more reliable and require less toxic industrial processes.
In that case, Peurifoy says, you can't do better than Uranium 235, which isn't nearly as expensive, toxic or fickle as plutonium.
Although a simpe uranium device (above, right) would produce a relatively small yield -- on the order of tens of kilotons -- dropping one on Kim Jong Il's Pleasure Palace would still ruin his day.
(Special Retro Bonus: Click here for a retro shot of former Sandia, and perhaps future Los Alamos, Director C. Paul Robinson).
Bat Bombs Away!
Now I know why they call 'em the Greatest Generation. What other group would have the moxie to turn bats into trained bomb-droppers?
The idea behind World War II's Project X-Ray "was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area," says Murdoc Online. "The bats would be in a sort of hibernation, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a parachute) they would warm up and awaken."
At the appropriate altitude, the bomb would open and over one thousand bats, each carrying a tiny time-delay napalm incendiary device, would flutter away and roost in various nooks and crannies, many of them in extremely flammable wooden Japanese buildings.
The napalm devices would go off more or less simultaneously, and thousands of little fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the ability of the Japanese firefighters to contain them would quickly be overwhelmed...
Seems to me, as outrageous as it sounds, that it could have worked... In fact, one afternoon while demonstrating the napalm devices, several bats woke too early in the lab, flew off, and ended up burning down the brand-new but uninhabited Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico. Really.
Of course, this is the era of warrior-thinkers that came up will all sorts of so-crazy-it-might -just-work schemes -- items like paper bombs, plague-filled subs, and aircraft carriers made of ice.
The October 1990 edition of Air Force magazine has a hilariously detailed rundown of the whole bat bomb episode. And Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman covers all sorts of WWII-era military research follies in his book Laboratory Warriors: How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II.
THERE'S MORE: "Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it," snarks Joel.
WWII PLAGUE SUB FOUND
St. Patrick's Day was just supposed to be another day of routine training for undersea researchers at the University of Hawaii. But then, they found something extraordinary 870 meters down, off of Barbers Point, Oahu: a mammoth, World War II-era Japanese sub, meant for biological combat.
The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled...
An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.
When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the mission reportedly was changed to bomb the Panama Canal. Both submarines were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor and were deliberately sunk later, partly because Russian scientists were demanding access to them.
"It is not the first World War II-era 'monster' that the HURL [Hawaii Undersea Research Lab] scientists have found," notes the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. "Last year, off Pearl Harbor, they located the wreck of the gigantic seaplane Marshall Mars, one of the largest aircraft built and used as a transport plane by the U.S. Navy. Two years earlier in the same area, the HURL crew also found the wreckage of a Japanese midget sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941." (via Boing Boing)
"RATS, BUGS, BOYS" REDUX
It's been nearly two weeks since Defense Tech highlighted a series of rather silly Pentagon schemes to fluster enemy soldiers by harassing them with rats, stinging bees, and men in heat. And, since then, the international press has been having a big ol' belly laugh with the so-called "gay sex bomb."
One man isn't smiling, however. That would be Edward Hammond, the bioweapons researcher at the Sunshine Project who, uh, turned me on to the proposed "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals." He says that Pentagon spokesmen fibbed when they claimed that the ideas in the document were "rejected out of hand."
* In 2000, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) prepared a promotional CD-ROM on its work. This CD-ROM, which was distributed to other US military and government agencies in an effort to spur further development of "non-lethal" weapons, contained the "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals" document. If the proposal had been rejected out of hand and not taken seriously, it would not have been placed in JNLWD's publication.
* Similarly, in 2001, JNLWD commissioned a study of "non-lethal" weapons by the National Academies of Science (NAS). JNLWD provided information on proposed weapons systems for assessment by an NAS scientific panel. Among the proposals that JNLWD submitted to the NAS for consideration by the nation's pre-eminent scientific advisory organization was "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals".
Thus, the Pentagon's statements (as quoted in news reports) are inaccurate and should be corrected.
BROADWAY'S SECRET TRAIN
There are a zillion reasons why New York is the City with a big "C," and everyone else lives in the land of the lowercase. But right up there at the top of the list is our sprawling subway, the central nervous system of this town. And it turns 100 today.
Like every grand project, there are lots of stories behind its building. But my favorite has to be the one about the secret train which ran under Broadway.
Back in the 1860's, New York had become beyond overcrowded, quadrupling its population in just 40 years. Something had to be done to ease the city's traffic woes. But Boss Tweed, the City's unchallenged ruler at the time, had his hand in the trolley business, and wouldn't let alternatives flower.
So Alfred Beach – the editor and co-owner of Scientific American – decided to build a subway in secret. He had a license to build a mail delivery system under Broadway using pneumatics, or compressed-air. But Beach expanded those tubes many times over, so they could carry people in air-powered trains.
The idea was to make an underground railway so grand, that even Tweed could not resist the public pressure for it. And the scheme almost worked. Unveiled in 1870, Beach's subway was, by all accounts, a smooth, quiet ride. And it was ornate – chandeliers adorned the ceiling of the demonstration terminal. In the middle sat a grand piano.
The press went ga-ga over Beach's railway. 400,000 people paid a quarter to make the one-block trip in the first year the train was open. New York's Senate and Assembly passed bills authorizing Beach to build a Manhattan-long pneumatic subway.
But Tweed, as usual, had the last laugh. Governor John Hoffman, his puppet, vetoed the subway bill. Beach's dream died that day in Albany. It'd take another thirty years before New York would start digging.
WORLD WAR II'S PAPER BOMB ATTACK
It's one of World War II's oddest, and least-known stories: In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese sent a fleet of hydrogen-filled, paper balloons across the jet stream to strike North America. And it worked.
Out of the 9,000 handmade incendiaries sent, 1,000 eventually landed here. And not just along the West Coast , but as far east as suburban Detroit.
Slate (via /.) reviews the tale, gives a warning or two about censorship, and provides a few links.
THERE'S MORE: "In my research for Terrors And Marvels: How Science
And Technology Changed The Character And Outcome Of World War II, I came across an original photo, in the FDR Library at Hyde Park, of one of the paper balloon bombs, tethered on a base in Montana," Defense Tech dad Tom Shachtman writes.
The photo was there because it had crossed the president's desk, and it had clearly alarmed him and his aides. (It is reproduced in the book.) In general the balloons did very little harm, though, no more than isolated lightning strikes might have done, and their landing sites were less predictable than lightning strikes.
The Canadian government did ready a plane full of peat moss that they could impregnate with bubonic plague, for retaliation on Japan in case one of the paper balloon bombs did contain biological, disease-causing agents. In withholding information on the balloons from the public until American and Canadian scientists could determine the make-up of the payloads, the censorship served its basic purposes: to prevent panic in the general public, and also to prevent trigger-happy people in the military from sending peat-bombs in return.
SWINGING 60'S DRONE OVER IRAQ
Sure, the Pentagon's latest and greatest drones were there. But Gulf War II also saw the remergence of an unmanned plane that got its start nearly four decades ago, Defense Tech pal CW notes.
"Vietnam-era Firebee drones [flew] over Baghdad to drop radar-jamming chaff and, until they ran out of fuel, to circle the city as decoys to draw anti-aircraft fire away from coalition strike aircraft."
Jim Pinkerton described the drone last year in the Houston Chronicle:
Called the "Ryan Firebee" after its inventor, the drone is 23 feet long with a wingspan of 12 feet. A J-2 jet engine, the same type used in small trainers, powers the Firebee, giving it a range of more than 300 miles. According to the crew, the five drones are the only ones of their kind in the Air Force's inventory..... Each drone... was programmed to fly to Baghdad, on to Tikrit -- Saddam's hometown and his power base -- then back to Baghdad, making multiple passes over the Iraqi capital.
MOON BASE: RECURRING DREAM
Moon Base? Old news.
In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start. Because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.
Since word of Bush's space plan leaked last week, political rivals and some space-policy experts have assaulted it for being too expensive and grandiose.
But the 2004 plan sounds downright meek compared with a 1959 scheme to use nearly 150 rockets to outfit a military outpost on the moon. A 180-person lunar commune probably isn't in the works, as was proposed in 1972. And it's hard to imagine a replay of 1975's idea to build a 100-ton, magnetic-levitation train for tossing bags of freshly mined lunar soil into space, where it would be processed into industrial supplies.
My Wired News article has looks at some of history's kookiest moon plans.
THERE'S MORE: Ben Bova, Greg Bear and other science-fiction luminaries are fired up about the new space plan.
WORLD WAR II FOLLY: BRITS' ICEBERG SHIPS
As the Allies prepared to invade occupied Europe in 1942, a truly nutty idea swept through the British military hierarchy: build giant aircraft carriers made of ice.
The ships could be made cheaply, they figured. And, maybe, they could be constructed tough enough to withstand bullets and torpedoes.
With Churchill's blessing, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, began the task of developing "berg-ships" up to 4,000 feet long, 600 feet wide and 130 feet in depth.
His task seemed to get easier when, in early 1943, "two American professors discovered that a very tough material could be produced by adding a small amount of wood pulp to water before freezing. They called this material pykrete, in honour of (Mountbatten's scientific advisor) Geoffrey Pyke," Combinedrops.com says.
Lord Mountbatten had a block of pykrete prepared by a Canadian engineering company, and took this block to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. As it appeared that "Habbakuk" would run into supply and technical problems, not to mention the high costs ($100 million for the first ship), it was Mountbatten’s aim to get the Americans to take over the project. It is reported that he fired a revolver at the pykrete block during a coffee break, and the bullet bounced off and struck one of the senior officers who were present - thankfully without serious injury!
Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman wrote about this folly in Laboratory Warriors : How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II (out now in paperback). Take it away, Pop:
To my mind, the major interest of the story of this absurd enterprise is how far it went before the bubble was burst. This was a loony idea all along, and its premise was easily refuted by science and even easier by mathematics -- you just had to compute how much of the stuff would be needed to make a floating airfield, plug in a few figures about the output of wood from Canadian forests, and realize that it would take the entire country's forests to make one field.
But because the idea had powerful patrons, Churchill and Mountbatten, who were not scientists but politicians whose authority could direct the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars, millions of dollars were spent on it. It reminds us that Star Wars is not the only science-fiction fantasy to enchant the mind of a leader of the Western world.
(via Boing Boing)
THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech buddy Wyatt Earp points us to great pictures and diagrams of the berg-ships here and to a longer essay on the subject here.
AND MORE: Another Defense Tech pal says Mountbatten's effort wasn't "really the folly that it seems."
The coast guard long ago gave up trying to destroy icebergs and they are simple fresh water bergs, not pykrete. Given the other advances dreamt up by the British that made carrier-based jet aviation practical (and safer) like the angled flight deck and steam catapults it's not necessarily something to be dismissed out of hand. RULCCs (REALLY Ultra Large Crude Carriers) made of ice just might turn out to be structurally stronger and more damage resistant than the current crop of aging ULCCs rusting their way along the seaways today. Toss in built-in obsolescence and easy recycling...
