Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Hey! Four out of five. That means there was someone who both knew what to do and actually did it! Well, at least there’s that. Someone would still be alive to run the country. Who was that person, by the way, who followed protocol and went to Andrews Air Force Base to be flown to an undisclosed safe location?

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was later indicted on federal charges of structuring bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements, making false statements to federal investigators, and sexually abusing three male students when he was a teacher more than three decades earlier (it ended up being four students). He would become a guest of the government at the Federal Medical Center prison in Rochester, Minnesota.

He has since been released, but has been banned from having contact with anyone under eighteen unless an adult is present. He also has to provide copies of his phone bills and credit card statements to his supervising probation officer, and is forbidden from using the internet without prior approval from a probation officer.

That is who could have been the leader of the free world.

We develop technologies to keep the president safe for a reason.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prolific inventor Leonardo da Vinci hoped to develop a human-powered flying machine (he also dabbled in painting, architecture, poetry… and apparently mastered karate and the katana too). For research, Leonardo studied birds in flight. He was particularly interested in how birds like the albatross could fly hundreds of miles while only minimally flapping their wings. He sketched the birds, added annotations about their patterns of flight, and carefully studied their aerodynamics.

He didn’t know it at the time (although he might have suspected), but Leonardo was on to something. Without being able to define it, or to know the physical principles behind the phenomenon, he was the first to document what would later be called the “dynamic soaring” flight maneuver.

Here’s how it works (in a really, really basic sense): The albatross (and other birds) are able to harness energy by flying through the boundary layer between slower-moving and faster-moving air—difference in wind speed is called wind shear. Traveling in and out of different wind speeds in certain patterns has the potential to provide extra energy. Thus birds, if they are crafty enough, can soar indefinitely, as long as they bounce from shear to shear, picking up energy.

In the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force began development of a top-secret space vehicle that would ride a big rocket into space, and then would come back to Earth under a controlled descent. Fairly straightforward, right? Kind of. Here’s the difference: Before it came back down, the space plane would use its wings and its speed to bounce around the world along the upper atmosphere. Boing, boing, boing. Down and up, down and up, until its loss of energy and speed required it to begin reentry procedures. Once inside the Earth’s atmosphere, the space plane would glide down to the surface and land.

Now you know why I was telling you about birds (I hope). Same basic concept, isn’t it? But instead of wind shear, it’s the upper atmosphere. And instead of albatrosses, it’s spacecraft. Boing, boing, boing.

The similarities were so apparent to the developers of the space plane that they decided to name it in homage to the physical principles it exemplified: dynamic soaring.

What a nice touch. I wonder what name you could make out of those two words that would really bring home the idea of a top-secret, state-of-the-art military space plane. I guess you could combine the two words, make a portmanteau like “bromance,” or “carjack,” or “infomercial,” or “mansplaining,” or “Brangelina.” But that’s not a good idea, because then you would have…

Dyna-Soar? Seriously?

Yes, seriously. They called the thing the Dyna-Soar.

No. I have no idea why they thought this was a good idea.

But what’sin a name?

Yet the Dyna-Soar didn’t just materialize out of very thin, outer-atmospheric air. It is the culmination of a long line of experimental aircraft developed during the Cold War to push the boundaries of human flight. Its immediate predecessor was the North American Aviation X-15, which was developed in the mid-1950s. After being dropped from the bottom of a B-52 bomber, the X-15 rocket plane could reach a maximum speed of Mach 6.7 (4,520 mph) and a maximum altitude of more than sixty-five miles. It flew so high that the pilots had to wear full-pressure flight suits, similar to what NASA’s astronauts would later wear. It flew so high that its wings and rudders were basically useless. It depended on small “reaction thrusters” to maneuver. You can see one of the two remaining X-15s at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

By 1955, the U.S. Air Force was trying to determine the next step in aircraft evolution. Engineers had been toying with multiple concepts, each designed to address a specific mission need. One was for a rocket-powered bomber (code-named ROBO, for “rocket bomber”), another was for a high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance plane (code-named BRASS BELL), and one called HYWARDS, which stood for “Hypersonic Weapons Research and Development System.” Eventually, the Air Force amalgamated these ideas into a single request for a vehicle that might have the capability to do everything, but in space . In 1957, they asked for design concepts for their new program, “System 464L.” The Boeing Company eventually won the contract, and in 1959 the S464L was rechristened the Dyna-Soar.

The plan was to roll out Dyna-Soar in three stages. Dyna-Soar I would be used for proof-of-concept research to test velocity, range, and the ability to use rocket boosters to drive the space plane to altitude. Dyna-Soar II would be focused on the reconnaissance mission. Once the plane reached altitude, the pilot would monitor the operation of several pieces of intelligence-gathering hardware, including a high-resolution camera, a side-looking radar, and electronics intelligence sensors. It could spy on ground targets with ease, but could also take a close look at enemy satellites in space. If Dyna-Soar did an adequate job, it was a potential replacement for the soon-to-be-antiquated A-12/SR-71s. Finally, Dyna-Soar III would be the complete package. It could easily carry out intel missions, but could also be equipped with a nuclear weapons delivery system that could reach anywhere on the globe in a matter of minutes, from any direction, with limited radar visibility, and with little warning of an attack. Flying in space gave you those capabilities. Unlike an ICBM or an SLBM, the Dyna-Soar could be recalled during the mission if the geopolitical calculus changed after launch.

Seven pilots were originally chosen for the program. One of the new pilots was asked to come up with the emergency launch abort procedure, in case one of the rockets used to blast the Dyna-Soar to altitude decided to blow up on the launch pad. The way things were set up, the pilot would be only a hundred feet above the ground while waiting for launch, with the space plane’s nose facing straight up in the air. Ejecting from this low height—and since the plane was vertical, ejecting sideways— was an insane and almost certainly deadly task. So the pilot had some figuring out to do.

He decided to test things out in another aircraft, a Douglas Skylancer, which could somewhat mimic the conditions on the launch pad—with some imaginative flying. He flew two hundred feet off the ground at almost 600 mph, and then pulled straight up and screamed to eight thousand feet. He flipped the plane around, got it upright, and then softly landed the aircraft. It was a crazy maneuver, and this written description doesn’t do it justice. But it proved a point—if the rocket began to explode beneath the Dyna-Soar, the pilot could just kick the plane’s engine in gear and blast off as fast as he could. The acceleration of the plane would allow the pilot to escape the fireball below and reach an altitude at which he could roll it over, turn it around, and find a good place to park.