Science: PIONEERS IN SPACE-AIR FORCE SCIENTISTS FACE THE UNKNOWN

THE U.S. Air Force is many things: young men in airplanes, bases scattered around the earth, schools and radars and stocks of bombs. But it is also an army of scientific pioneers who push out the frontiers of knowledge on dozens of fronts. This scientific army is never at peace; it probes the top of the atmosphere and measures the shape of the earth. Its weapons are drawing boards, wind tunnels, computers, rockets and vacuum tubes. It can never slow down. To keep the U.S. ahead in the race for air power requires daring imagination and the continual skillful use of fantastic equipment.

Few Americans notice the scientific airmen. Most of those who are stationed near population centers work in ordinary-looking laboratories. Their projects are quiet ones: electronics, meteorology, untangling the scrambled figures that come from field experiments. Some of these are hard to believe. The Air Force Research Center at Cambridge, Mass., for instance, has a program for mapping mountains on the moon, an operation seemingly unconnected with flight on earth.*

Far off on deserts, in forests and on snow-covered mountaintops, the scientific shock troops toss rockets out of the atmosphere or study the performance of dangerous experimental airplanes. Some of these men seldom touch aircraft, “inhabited” or “uninhabited.” With weird telescopic cameras, they photograph the trails of meteors, measure the night glow of the sky or the brightness of searchlight beams pointed toward the stars. All these methods give information about the high atmosphere, where future aircraft will fly.

Nerve Center. Official headquarters of the Air Research and Development Command is at Baltimore, but the technical nerve center is Wright Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton. It dates, under various names, back to World War I, and has grown into a massive tangle of intricate equipment. It tests everything from pin-head-size transistors to heavy bombers, loading them with weights or twisting their wings with tension devices. Turbojet engines, ramjets and rocket motors bellow on test stands like prehistoric monsters.

Less spectacular but not less important gadgets measure the performance of fabrics, plastics, ceramics, alloys and an endless assortment of the electrical nerves and senses that proliferate through modern aircraft. Helicopter rotors spin in test cells that look like oil storage tanks; wind tunnels roar and rumble, solving the endless problems of aerodynamics.

The human body is also tested. Wright whirls men in centrifuges, spinning them like tops, measuring their reaction to violent aircraft motions. It also devises ejection seats, life rafts and survival equipment to bring them back alive when their aircraft fails. More advanced work of this sort is done at the School of Aviation Medicine, Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, where specialized physiologists try to adapt fragile-fleshed man to the hostile conditions of high-altitude, high-speed flight. One of their tools is a low-pressure chamber where men in space-cadet pressure suits try to keep at work, while a near-vacuum sucks at their flesh and tries to boil their blood.

Wright is still growing. Its researchers are deep in nuclear physics (atomic airplanes are in the offing), and a new $3,000,000 laboratory will soon be built. But the often-rainy weather of Ohio is better for farming than for flight testing, and the country around houses too many innocent bystanders. A nightmare of Wright authorities is the possibility of dropping a skittish new airplane into downtown Dayton. So Wright has set up distant colonies to perform specialized functions.

Fabulous Lake. Most of the airplane flight testing is now done at Edwards Air Force Base on the Mojave Desert, Calif., a fabulous place where Muroc Dry Lake (so wondrously flat that it curves like the earth) offers 65 square miles of landing area and a 22-mile runway. At Muroc, where the sky is almost always blue, and there is no nearby city to worry about, prototype airplanes make their maiden flights, followed through the sky by radars and theodolites and loaded with instruments that report every strain and flutter by radio-telemetering. Here the world’s speed and altitude records (1,650 m.p.h. and 90,000 ft.) by Major Arthur Murray were made in the Bell XiA. Muroc’s most spectacular current project is testing the Bell X2, a souped-up rocket job that is expected to do better than 2,000 m.p.h.

Successful tests at Edwards and Wright are enough to convince the Air Force that it ought to accept a new airplane. When production models appear, another series of tests begins at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, 50 miles east of Pensacola, where the Air Proving Ground flies them under every possible condition and evaluates in detail their military value. Eglin, a cluster of many flying fields, occupies a 465,000-acre reservation that was formerly a national forest. It roars all day and sometimes all night with the latest airplanes taking off and landing.

Arctic Jungle. Most conspicuous feature at Eglin is the Climatic Hangar, a hulking, thick-walled building with massive doors that can be rolled away on rails. Its interior, big enough for a 6-36 (wingspread 230 ft.), is cooled to the temperature (65° F.) of a cold snap in Alaska. Airplanes and other equipment, including items submitted by the Army and Navy, are put in this giant deepfreeze and “cold-soaked” for days. Then every detail of their operation is tested elaborately by men in Eskimo parkas. All sorts of bugs show up. Lubricants freeze; gaskets leak; insulation grows brittle and cracks; metal parts contract and twist out of line. Only when such defects have been spotted and corrected is an airplane safe to fly at extreme altitudes or from arctic bases.

The Climatic Hangar has other tortures for new equipment. One room can simulate an arctic blizzard, complete with howling wind and sandblasting snow. Other rooms are as hot as the tropics. One of them is hot and humid, like a jungle, and dusted with spores of voracious fungi purveyed by the Bureau of Standards.

Spacious though Edwards and Eglin are, they are not spacious enough for some of the operations of Air Force scientists. Rockets and guided missiles are much too fractious to be tested anywhere near a thickly populated area. So for missile work the Air Force has Holloman Air Force Base in an empty part of New Mexico and Patrick Air Force Base on the coast of Florida.

Desert Rocket Range. Holloman is a dreary post in an alkali-dusted desert, but some of the Air Force scientists’ most spectacular achievements have been accomplished there. From a tall steel tower Aerobee rockets scream into the sky, carrying instruments to explore the boundaries of space. Sixty Aerobees have been fired, carrying 150-lb. payloads to 70 miles. The new Aerobee-Hi (two have been fired)carries the same load to 150 miles. The Aerobees are research rockets, not weapons, but Holloman also tests moderate-range guided missiles.

Besides these hard-shelled projects. Holloman also works with all-too-soft human flesh. The famed Space Surgeon John Paul Stapp (TIME, Sept. 12) speeds across the desert on his rocket sled to see how much strain the human body can stand. Another Holloman specialty is radio-controlled drone aircraft, which are used as targets and as a means of improving missile guidance systems. Perhaps the most picturesque program is “space biology,” which includes sending living organisms (bacteria to monkeys) up to the edge of space in rockets. The condition in which they return to earth gives some idea of what humans will have to prepare for when they fly through space.

Long-Ranged Patrick. Some modern missiles are too long-ranged for Holloman, big and remote as it is. To test these fearsome “birds,” most of which are highly secret, the Air Force maintains Patrick Air Force Base on the east coast of central Florida. From Cape Canaveral, a scrub-covered island a few miles offshore, a long, highly instrumented range slants southeast across the Bahamas, skirts the Dominican Republic and crosses a corner of Puerto Rico. This distance, more than 1,000 miles, is enough for the present, but the range is being extended to Ascension Island between Brazil and Africa, making its total length more than 5,000 miles.

Most of the activities at Patrick are not for publication. Except for the Matador, an “aerodynamic” (wing-supported) missile that is operational and obsolete, the public gets only glimpses of the birds that it puts on the wing. Some of them rise out of the atmosphere, but not all. One of them, the Snark, has had so many mishaps that the sea near the start of the range has been ruefully called the “Snark-infested waters of Cape Canaveral.”

Hypersonic Tunnels. Present-day aircraft and missiles grew out of wind tunnels that are comparatively small or slow. To design the missiles of the future, whose speed will be respectable on the astronomical scale, requires wind tunnels of a new order of size and speed. A group of these monsters, whose jointed shells look a little like primitive mollusks, is nearing completion at Arnold Engineering Development Center, at Tullahoma,

Tenn. Only one of the smaller tunnels is in use, but air races through it at up to 4,000 m.p.h.

This is only a beginning. The biggest tunnels will duplicate or simulate flight at ten times the speed of sound (7,600 m.p.h.). At this “hypersonic” speed, one of the major problems is the sudden cooling of the racing air, whose chilled oxygen and nitrogen condense into mist. To keep the air from playing this trick, it must be heated to as high as 1,500° F., and the walls must be water-cooled to keep them from fusing. One of the tunnels will need electric motors of 200,000 h.p. to push its air. The data that flow from all the tunnels will be digested instantaneously by Univac computers.

Out of the information discovered at Tullahoma will grow hypersonic missiles that will be at home in the top of the atmosphere like non-burning meteors. Presumably they will be tested in the 5,000-mile range from Patrick to Ascension Island. But before these birds can fly. the Air Force must know thousands of things about the air and the earth, the sun and the moon. It needs faster and better electronic equipment.

Headquarters for esoteric electronics is Rome Air Development Center at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York. Here the Air Force scientists work out guidance devices for the far-flying missiles, radar to detect them, and communication systems to warn of attack. One of Rome’s most secret concerns is electronic warfare: methods of using radio waves to deceive and confuse an enemy attack whether by airplane or missiles.

Earth, Sun, Air. The farthest frontiers of Air Force science are the charge of Cambridge Research Center, Bedford, Mass. It is a strange outfit, and most of its programs seem to have little to do with any kind of warfare. There is a pattern, however. Aircraft of today fly in the lower atmosphere, which is not too well understood. Soon they will fly much higher where knowledge is even more scanty.

Existing missiles pass through the upper atmosphere (hardly understood at all), and future missiles will eventually move through space under the influence “of the earth’s gravitation (which is not constant). So the Air Force scientists must reach for every scrap of information about the atmosphere and the earth.

One of their outlying stations is a solar observatory on Sacramento Peak, N. Mex.

(the sun stirs the air and electrifies its upper layers). Another group from Cambridge does its field work at Holloman, sending instruments up on rockets to bring back a better picture of the upper atmosphere.

Over much of the earth range the Cambridge scientists. They study the weather and try to predict it; they try to modify cloud formations; they fly instrumented B-475 into the jet stream that races around the earth; they study radiation from atomic weapons (it may be a problem for aircraft that drop them); they map in new detail the earth’s magnetic field (missiles may steer by it); they study the shape of the earth and look for anomalies (variations) in its gravitational field. Missiles curving through space above the atmosphere will be affected by an anomaly, and when the first satellites hurry around the earth, their orbits will be waved and scalloped by varying forces reaching out from its center. So the Cambridge men must hurry and tell the Air Force all they can discover about the planet that earthlings ride on.

All the other Air Force scientists must hurry too; every new weapon project calls for materials and components of higher and higher performance. Human nerves and senses and brains must be better understood, and nonhuman brains (computing devices) with greater intelligence must be constructed. Ideas of promise must be exploited, and new ideas must be extracted from both gadgetmakers and theoretical scientists. There is no rest in the fight for air power, and no end in sight.

* Irregularities on the moon’s surface affect the observation of solar eclipses, which can be used to measure accurately the distances between earthly continents. This is important for the Air Force’s most ambitious project, the intercontinental ballistic missile.