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Friday, November 29, 2019
Reading List: Atomic Energy for Military Purposes
- Smyth, Henry D. Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, [1945] 1990. ISBN 978-0-8047-1722-9.
-
This document was released to the general public by the United
States War Department on August 12th, 1945, just days after
nuclear weapons had been dropped on Japan (Hiroshima on
August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th). The author, Prof.
Henry D. Smyth of Princeton University, had worked on the
Manhattan Project since early 1941, was involved in a
variety of theoretical and practical aspects of the
effort, and possessed security clearances which gave him
access to all of the laboratories and production facilities
involved in the project. In May, 1944, Smyth, who had
suggested such a publication, was given the go ahead by
the Manhattan Project's Military Policy Committee to
prepare an unclassified summary of the bomb project. This
would have a dual purpose: to disclose to citizens and
taxpayers what had been done on their behalf, and to
provide scientists and engineers involved in the project a
guide to what they could discuss openly in the postwar
period: if it was in the “Smyth Report” (as
it came to be called), it was public information, otherwise
mum's the word.
The report is a both an introduction to the physics
underlying nuclear fission and its use in both steady-state
reactors and explosives, production of fissile material
(both
separation
of reactive Uranium-235 from the much more
abundant Uranium-238 and
production
of Plutonium-239 in
nuclear reactors), and the administrative history and
structure of the project. Viewed as a historical document,
the report is as interesting in what it left out as what
was disclosed. Essentially none of the key details discovered
and developed by the Manhattan Project which might be of use
to aspiring bomb makers appear here. The key pieces
of information which were not known to interested physicists
in 1940 before the curtain of secrecy descended upon anything
related to nuclear fission were inherently disclosed by the
very fact that a fission bomb had been built, detonated, and
produced a very large explosive yield.
- It was possible to achieve a fast fission reaction with substantial explosive yield.
- It was possible to prepare a sufficient quantity of fissile material (uranium or plutonium) to build a bomb.
- The critical mass required by a bomb was within the range which could be produced by a country with the industrial resources of the United States and small enough that it could be delivered by an aircraft.
Posted at
23:45
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Reading List: Wrench and Claw
- Howe, Steven D. Wrench and Claw. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2011. ASIN B005JPZ74A.
- In the conclusion of the author's Honor Bound Honor Born (May 2014), an explorer on the Moon discovers something that just shouldn't be there, which calls into question the history of the Earth and Moon and humanity's place in it. This short novel (or novella—it's 81 pages in a print edition) explores how that anomaly came to be and presents a brilliantly sketched alternative history which reminds the reader just how little we really know about the vast expanses of time which preceded our own species' appearance on the cosmic stage. Vesquith is an Army lieutenant assigned to a base on the Moon. The base is devoted to research, exploration, and development of lunar resources to expand the presence on the Moon, but more recently has become a key asset in Earth's defence, as its Lunar Observation Post (LOP) allows monitoring the inner solar system. This has become crucial since the Martian colony, founded with high hopes, has come under the domination of self-proclaimed “King” Rornak, whose religious fanatics infiltrated the settlement and now threaten the Earth with an arsenal of nuclear weapons they have somehow obtained and are using to divert asteroids to exploit their resources for the development of Mars. Independently, Bob, a field paleontologist whose expedition is running short of funds, is enduring a fundraising lecture at a Denver museum by a Dr Dietlief, a crowd-pleasing science populariser who regales his audiences with illustrations of how little we really know about the Earth's past, stretching for vast expanses of time compared to that since the emergence of modern humans, and wild speculations about what might have come and gone during those aeons, including the rise and fall of advanced technological civilisations whose works may have disappeared without a trace in a million years or so after their demise due to corrosion, erosion, and the incessant shifting of the continents and recycling of the Earth's surface. How do we know that, somewhere beneath our feet, yet to be discovered by paleontologists who probably wouldn't understand what they'd found, lies “something like a crescent wrench clutched in a claw?” Dietlief suggests that even if paleontologists came across what remained of such evidence after dozens of millions of years they'd probably not recognise it because they weren't looking for such a thing and didn't have the specialised equipment needed to detect it. On the Moon, Vesquith and his crew return to base to find it has been attacked, presumably by an advance party from Mars, wiping out a detachment of Amphibious Marines sent to guard the LOP and disabling it, rendering Earth blind to attack from Mars. The survivors must improvise with the few resources remaining from the attack to meet their needs, try to restore communications with Earth to warn of a possible attack and request a rescue mission, and defend against possible additional assaults on their base. This is put to the test when another contingent of invaders arrives to put the base permanently out of commission and open the way for a general attack on Earth. Bob, meanwhile, thanks to funds raised by Dr Dietlief's lecture, has been able to extend his fieldwork, add some assistants, and equip his on-site lab with some new analytic equipment…. This is a brilliant story which rewrites the history of the Earth and sets the stage for the second volume in the Earth Rise series, Honor Bound Honor Born. There is so much going on and so many surprises that I can't really say much more without venturing into spoiler territory, so I won't. The only shortcoming is that, like many self-published works, it stumbles over the humble apostrophe, and particularly its shock troops, the “its/it's” brigade. During the author's twenty year career at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he worked on a variety of technologies including nuclear propulsion and applications of nuclear power to space exploration and development. Since the 1980s he has been an advocate of a “power rich” approach to space missions, in particular lunar and Mars bases. The lunar base described in the story implements this strategy, but it's not central to the story and doesn't intrude upon the adventure. This book is presently available only in a Kindle edition, which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Posted at
20:29
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Reading List: Sunburst and Luminary
- Eyles, Don. Sunburst and Luminary. Boston: Fort Point Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-9863859-3-3.
-
In 1966, the author graduated from Boston University with a
bachelor's degree in mathematics. He had no immediate job
prospects or career plans. He thought he might be interested
in computer programming due to a love of solving puzzles, but he
had never programmed a computer. When asked, in one of numerous
job interviews, how he would go about writing a program to
alphabetise a list of names, he admitted he had no idea. One
day, walking home from yet another interview, he passed an
unimpressive brick building with a sign identifying it as
the “MIT Instrumentation Laboratory”. He'd heard
a little about the place and, on a lark, walked in and asked
if they were hiring. The receptionist handed him a long
application form, which he filled out, and was then immediately
sent to interview with a personnel officer. Eyles was
amazed when the personnel man seemed bent on persuading
him to come to work at the Lab. After reference checking, he
was offered a choice of two jobs: one in the “analysis
group” (whatever that was), and another on the team
developing computer software for landing the Apollo Lunar
Module (LM) on the Moon. That sounded interesting, and the job
had another benefit attractive to a 21 year old just
graduating from university: it came with deferment from the
military draft, which was going into high gear as U.S.
involvement in Vietnam deepened.
Near the start of the Apollo project, MIT's Instrumentation
Laboratory, led by the legendary “Doc”
Charles
Stark Draper, won a sole source contract to design and
program the guidance system for the
Apollo spacecraft, which came to be known as the
“Apollo
Primary Guidance, Navigation, and Control System”
(PGNCS, pronounced “pings”). Draper and his
laboratory had pioneered inertial guidance systems for aircraft,
guided missiles, and submarines, and had in-depth expertise in
all aspects of the challenging problem of enabling the Apollo
spacecraft to navigate from the Earth to the Moon, land on the
Moon, and return to the Earth without any assistance from
ground-based assets. In a normal mission, it was expected that
ground-based tracking and computers would assist those on board
the spacecraft, but in the interest of reliability and
redundancy it was required that completely autonomous
navigation would permit accomplishing the mission.
The Instrumentation Laboratory developed an integrated system
composed of an
inertial
measurement unit consisting of gyroscopes
and accelerometers that provided a stable reference from which the
spacecraft's orientation and velocity could be determined, an
optical telescope which allowed aligning the inertial platform
by taking sightings on fixed stars, and an
Apollo
Guidance Computer (AGC), a general purpose digital computer which
interfaced to the guidance system, thrusters and engines on
the spacecraft, the astronauts' flight controls, and mission
control, and was able to perform the complex calculations for
en route maneuvers and the unforgiving lunar landing process in
real time.
Every Apollo lunar landing mission carried two AGCs: one in the
Command Module and another in the Lunar Module. The computer
hardware, basic operating system, and navigation support
software were identical, but the mission software was customised
due to the different hardware and flight profiles of the Command
and Lunar Modules. (The commonality of the two computers proved
essential in getting the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth
after an explosion in the Service Module cut power to the
Command Module and disabled its computer. The Lunar Module's AGC
was able to perform the critical navigation and guidance
operations to put the spacecraft back on course for an Earth
landing.)
By the time Don Eyles was hired in 1966, the hardware design of
the AGC was largely complete (although a revision, called Block II,
was underway which would increase memory capacity and add some
instructions which had been found desirable during the initial
software development process), the low-level operating system and
support libraries (implementing such functionality as fixed
point arithmetic, vector, and matrix computations), and a
substantial part of the software for the Command Module had been
written. But the software for actually landing on the Moon,
which would run in the Lunar Module's AGC, was largely just a
concept in the minds of its designers. Turning this into
hard code would be the job of Don Eyles, who had never written
a line of code in his life, and his colleagues. They seemed
undaunted by the challenge: after all, nobody knew
how to land on the Moon, so whoever attempted the task would
have to make it up as they went along, and they had access, in
the Instrumentation Laboratory, to the world's most experienced
team in the area of inertial guidance.
Today's programmers may be amazed it was possible to get
anything at all done on a machine with the capabilities of the
Apollo Guidance Computer, no less fly to the Moon and land
there. The AGC had a total of 36,864 15-bit words of read-only
core
rope memory, in which every bit was hand-woven to the
specifications of the programmers. As read-only memory,
the contents were completely fixed: if a change was
required, the memory module in question (which was
“potted” in a plastic compound) had to be
discarded and a new one woven from scratch. There was
no way to make “software patches”.
Read-write storage was limited to 2048 15-bit words of
magnetic
core memory. The read-write memory was non-volatile: its
contents were preserved across power loss and restoration.
(Each memory word was actually 16 bits in length, but one bit
was used for parity checking to detect errors and not accessible
to the programmer.) Memory cycle time was 11.72 microseconds.
There was no external bulk storage of any kind (disc, tape, etc.):
everything had to be done with the read-only and read-write
memory built into the computer.
The AGC software was an example of “real-time
programming”, a discipline with which few contemporary
programmers are acquainted. As opposed to an “app”
which interacts with a user and whose only constraint on how
long it takes to respond to requests is the user's patience,
a real-time program has to meet inflexible constraints in
the real world set by the laws of physics, with failure
often resulting in disaster just as surely as hardware
malfunctions. For example, when the Lunar Module is descending
toward the lunar surface, burning its descent engine to brake
toward a smooth touchdown, the LM is perched atop
the thrust vector of the engine just like a pencil balanced
on the tip of your finger: it is inherently unstable, and
only constant corrections will keep it from tumbling over
and crashing into the surface, which would be bad. To prevent
this, the Lunar Module's AGC runs a piece of software called
the digital autopilot (DAP) which, every tenth of a second, issues
commands to steer the descent engine's nozzle to keep the Lunar
Module pointed flamy side down and adjusts the thrust to
maintain the desired descent velocity (the thrust must be
constantly adjusted because as propellant is burned, the mass of
the LM decreases, and less thrust is needed to maintain
the same rate of descent). The AGC/DAP absolutely must
compute these steering and throttle commands and send them to
the engine every tenth of a second. If it doesn't, the Lunar
Module will crash. That's what real-time computing is all about:
the computer has to deliver those results in real time, as the
clock ticks, and if it doesn't (for example, it decides to give
up and flash a Blue Screen of Death instead), then the consequences
are not an irritated or enraged user, but actual death in the real
world. Similarly, every two seconds the computer must
read the spacecraft's position from the inertial measurement
unit. If it fails to do so, it will hopelessly lose track of
which way it's pointed and how fast it is going. Real-time
programmers live under these demanding constraints and,
especially given the limitations of a computer such as the AGC,
must deploy all of their cleverness to meet them without fail,
whatever happens, including transient power failures,
flaky readings from instruments, user errors, and
completely unanticipated “unknown unknowns”.
The software which ran in the Lunar Module AGCs for Apollo
lunar landing missions was called LUMINARY, and in its final
form (version 210) used on Apollo 15, 16, and 17, consisted
of around 36,000 lines of code (a mix of assembly language
and interpretive code which implemented high-level operations),
of which Don Eyles wrote in excess of 2,200 lines, responsible
for the lunar landing from the start of braking from lunar
orbit through touchdown on the Moon. This was by far the most
dynamic phase of an Apollo mission, and the most demanding on
the limited resources of the AGC, which was pushed to around
90% of its capacity during the final landing phase where the
astronauts were selecting the landing spot and guiding the
Lunar Module toward a touchdown. The margin was razor-thin,
and that's assuming everything went as planned. But this was
not always the case.
It was when the unexpected happened that the genius of the AGC
software and its ability to make the most of the severely
limited resources at its disposal became apparent. As Apollo 11
approached the lunar surface, a series of five program alarms:
codes 1201 and 1202, interrupted the display of altitude and
vertical velocity being monitored by Buzz Aldrin and read off
to guide Neil Armstrong in flying to the landing spot. These
codes both indicated out-of-memory conditions in the AGC's
scarce read-write memory. The 1201 alarm was issued when
all five of the 44-word vector accumulator (VAC) areas were in use
when another program requested to use one, and 1202 signalled
exhaustion of the eight 12-word core sets required by
each running job. The computer had a single processor and
could execute only one task at a time, but its operating system
allowed lower priority tasks to be interrupted in order to
service higher priority ones, such as the time-critical autopilot
function and reading the inertial platform every two seconds.
Each suspended lower-priority job used up a core set and,
if it employed the interpretive mathematics library, a VAC,
so exhaustion of these resources usually meant the computer was
trying to do too many things at once. Task priorities
were assigned so the most critical functions would be completed
on time, but computer overload signalled something seriously
wrong—a condition in which it was impossible to guarantee
all essential work was getting done.
In this case, the computer would throw up its hands, issue a
program alarm, and restart. But this couldn't be a lengthy
reboot like customers of personal computers with millions of
times the AGC's capacity tolerate half a century later. The
critical tasks in the AGC's software incorporated restart
protection, in which they would frequently checkpoint their
current state, permitting them to resume almost instantaneously
after a restart. Programmers estimated around 4% of the AGC's
program memory was devoted to restart protection, and some
questioned its worth. On Apollo 11, it would save the landing
mission.
Shortly after the Lunar Module's landing radar locked onto
the lunar surface, Aldrin keyed in the code to monitor its
readings and immediately received a 1202 alarm: no core sets
to run a task; the AGC restarted. On the communications
link Armstrong called out “It's a 1202.” and
Aldrin confirmed “1202.”. This was followed by
fifteen seconds of silence on the “air to ground”
loop, after which Armstrong broke in with “Give us a
reading on the 1202 Program alarm.” At this point,
neither the astronauts nor the support team in Houston
had any idea what a 1202 alarm was or what it might mean
for the mission. But the nefarious simulation supervisors
had cranked in such “impossible” alarms in
earlier training sessions, and controllers had developed
a rule that if an alarm was infrequent and the Lunar Module
appeared to be flying normally, it was not a reason to abort the
descent.
At the Instrumentation Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Don Eyles and his colleagues knew precisely what a 1202 was and
found it was deeply disturbing. The AGC software had been
carefully designed to maintain a 10% safety margin under the
worst case conditions of a lunar landing, and 1202 alarms had
never occurred in any of their thousands of simulator runs using
the same AGC hardware, software, and sensors as Apollo 11's
Lunar Module. Don Eyles' analysis, in real time, just after a
second 1202 alarm occurred thirty seconds later, was:
Again our computations have been flushed and the LM is still flying. In Cambridge someone says, “Something is stealing time.” … Some dreadful thing is active in our computer and we do not know what it is or what it will do next. Unlike Garman [AGC support engineer for Mission Control] in Houston I know too much. If it were in my hands, I would call an abort.
As the Lunar Module passed 3000 feet, another alarm, this time a 1201—VAC areas exhausted—flashed. This is another indication of overload, but of a different kind. Mission control immediately calls up “We're go. Same type. We're go.” Well, it wasn't the same type, but they decided to press on. Descending through 2000 feet, the DSKY (computer display and keyboard) goes blank and stays blank for ten agonising seconds. Seventeen seconds later another 1202 alarm, and a blank display for two seconds—Armstrong's heart rate reaches 150. A total of five program alarms and resets had occurred in the final minutes of landing. But why? And could the computer be trusted to fly the return from the Moon's surface to rendezvous with the Command Module? While the Lunar Module was still on the lunar surface Instrumentation Laboratory engineer George Silver figured out what happened. During the landing, the Lunar Module's rendezvous radar (used only during return to the Command Module) was powered on and set to a position where its reference timing signal came from an internal clock rather than the AGC's master timing reference. If these clocks were in a worst case out of phase condition, the rendezvous radar would flood the AGC with what we used to call “nonsense interrupts” back in the day, at a rate of 800 per second, each consuming one 11.72 microsecond memory cycle. This imposed an additional load of more than 13% on the AGC, which pushed it over the edge and caused tasks deemed non-critical (such as updating the DSKY) not to be completed on time, resulting in the program alarms and restarts. The fix was simple: don't enable the rendezvous radar until you need it, and when you do, put the switch in the position that synchronises it with the AGC's clock. But the AGC had proved its excellence as a real-time system: in the face of unexpected and unknown external perturbations it had completed the mission flawlessly, while alerting its developers to a problem which required their attention. The creativity of the AGC software developers and the merit of computer systems sufficiently simple that the small number of people who designed them completely understood every aspect of their operation was demonstrated on Apollo 14. As the Lunar Module was checked out prior to the landing, the astronauts in the spacecraft and Mission Control saw the abort signal come on, which was supposed to indicate the big Abort button on the control panel had been pushed. This button, if pressed during descent to the lunar surface, immediately aborted the landing attempt and initiated a return to lunar orbit. This was a “one and done” operation: no Microsoft-style “Do you really mean it?” tea ceremony before ending the mission. Tapping the switch made the signal come and go, and it was concluded the most likely cause was a piece of metal contamination floating around inside the switch and occasionally shorting the contacts. The abort signal caused no problems during lunar orbit, but if it should happen during descent, perhaps jostled by vibration from the descent engine, it would be disastrous: wrecking a mission costing hundreds of millions of dollars and, coming on the heels of Apollo 13's mission failure and narrow escape from disaster, possibly bring an end to the Apollo lunar landing programme. The Lunar Module AGC team, with Don Eyles as the lead, was faced with an immediate challenge: was there a way to patch the software to ignore the abort switch, protecting the landing, while still allowing an abort to be commanded, if necessary, from the computer keyboard (DSKY)? The answer to this was obvious and immediately apparent: no. The landing software, like all AGC programs, ran from read-only rope memory which had been woven on the ground months before the mission and could not be changed in flight. But perhaps there was another way. Eyles and his colleagues dug into the program listing, traced the path through the logic, and cobbled together a procedure, then tested it in the simulator at the Instrumentation Laboratory. While the AGC's programming was fixed, the AGC operating system provided low-level commands which allowed the crew to examine and change bits in locations in the read-write memory. Eyles discovered that by setting the bit which indicated that an abort was already in progress, the abort switch would be ignored at the critical moments during the descent. As with all software hacks, this had other consequences requiring their own work-arounds, but by the time Apollo 14's Lunar Module emerged from behind the Moon on course for its landing, a complete procedure had been developed which was radioed up from Houston and worked perfectly, resulting in a flawless landing. These and many other stories of the development and flight experience of the AGC lunar landing software are related here by the person who wrote most of it and supported every lunar landing mission as it happened. Where technical detail is required to understand what is happening, no punches are pulled, even to the level of bit-twiddling and hideously clever programming tricks such as using an overflow condition to skip over an EXTEND instruction, converting the following instruction from double precision to single precision, all in order to save around forty words of precious non-bank-switched memory. In addition, this is a personal story, set in the context of the turbulent 1960s and early ’70s, of the author and other young people accomplishing things no humans had ever before attempted. It was a time when everybody was making it up as they went along, learning from experience, and improvising on the fly; a time when a person who had never written a line of computer code would write, as his first program, the code that would land men on the Moon, and when the creativity and hard work of individuals made all the difference. Already, by the end of the Apollo project, the curtain was ringing down on this era. Even though a number of improvements had been developed for the LM AGC software which improved precision landing capability, reduced the workload on the astronauts, and increased robustness, none of these were incorporated in the software for the final three Apollo missions, LUMINARY 210, which was deemed “good enough” and the benefit of the changes not worth the risk and effort to test and incorporate them. Programmers seeking this kind of adventure today will not find it at NASA or its contractors, but instead in the innovative “New Space” and smallsat industries.
Posted at
13:32
Friday, November 1, 2019
Reading List: Always Another Dawn
- Crossfield, Albert Scott and Clay Blair. Always Another Dawn. Seattle, CreateSpace, [1960] 2018. ISBN 978-1-7219-0050-3.
- The author was born in 1921 and grew up in Southern California. He was obsessed with aviation from an early age, wangling a ride in a plane piloted by a friend of his father (an open cockpit biplane) at age six. He built and flew many model airplanes and helped build the first gasoline-powered model plane in Southern California, with a home-built engine. The enterprising lad's paper route included a local grass field airport, and he persuaded the owner to trade him a free daily newspaper (delivery boys always received a few extra) for informal flying lessons. By the time he turned thirteen, young Scott (he never went by his first name, “Albert”) had accumulated several hours of flying time. In the midst of the Great Depression, his father's milk processing business failed, and he decided to sell out everything in California, buy a 120 acre run-down dairy farm in rural Washington state, and start over. Patiently, taking an engineer's approach to the operation: recording everything, controlling costs, optimising operations, and with the entire family pitching in on the unceasing chores, the ramshackle property was built into a going concern and then a showplace. Crossfield never abandoned his interest in aviation, and soon began to spend some of his scarce free time at the local airport, another grass field operation, where he continued to take flight lessons from anybody who would give them for the meagre pocket change he could spare. Finally, with a total of seven or eight hours dual control time, one of the pilots invited him to “take her up and try a spin.” This was highly irregular and, in fact, illegal: he had no student pilot certificate, but things were a lot more informal in those days, so off he went. Taking the challenge at its words, he proceeded to perform three spins and spin recoveries during his maiden solo flight. In 1940, at age eighteen, Scott left the farm. His interest in aviation had never flagged, and he was certain he didn't want to be a farmer. His initial goal was to pursue an engineering degree at the University of Washington and then seek employment in the aviation industry, perhaps as an engineering test pilot. But the world was entering a chaotic phase, and this chaos perturbed his well-drawn plans. “[B]y the time I was twenty I had entered the University, graduated from a civilian aviation school, officially soloed, and obtained my private pilot's license, withdrawn from the University, worked for Boeing Aircraft Company, quit to join the Air Force briefly, worked for Boeing again, and quit again to join the Navy.” After the U.S. entered World War II, the Navy was desperate for pilots and offered immediate entry to flight training to those with the kind of experience Crossfield had accumulated. Despite having three hundred flight hours in his logbook, Crossfield, like many military aviators, had to re-learn flying the Navy way. He credits it for making him a “professional, disciplined aviator.” Like most cadets, he had hoped for assignment to the fleet as a fighter pilot, but upon completing training he was immediately designated an instructor and spent the balance of the war teaching basic and advanced flying, gunnery, and bombing to hundreds of student aviators. Toward the end of the war, he finally received his long-awaited orders for fighter duty, but while in training the war ended without his ever seeing combat. Disappointed, he returned to his original career plan and spent the next four years at the University of Washington, obtaining Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Aeronautical Engineering. Maintaining his commission in the Naval Reserve, he organised a naval stunt flying team and used it to hone his precision formation flying skills. As a graduate student, he supported himself as chief operator of the university's wind tunnel, then one of the most advanced in the country, and his work brought him into frequent contact with engineers from aircraft companies who contracted time on the tunnel for tests on their designs. Surveying his prospects in 1950, Crossfield decided he didn't want to become a professor, which would be the likely outcome if he continued his education toward a Ph.D. The aviation industry was still in the postwar lull, but everything changed with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Suddenly, demand for the next generation of military aircraft, which had been seen as years in the future, became immediate, and the need for engineers to design and test them was apparent. Crossfield decided the most promising opportunity for someone with his engineering background and flight experience was as an “aeronautical research pilot” with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a U.S. government civilian agency founded in 1915 and chartered with performing pure and applied research in aviation, which was placed in the public domain and made available to all U.S. aircraft manufacturers. Unlike returning to the military, where his flight assignments would be at the whim of the service, at NACA he would be assured of working on the cutting edge of aviation technology. Through a series of personal contacts, he eventually managed to arrange an interview with the little-known NACA High Speed Flight Test Station at Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert of Southern California. Crossfield found himself at the very Mecca of high speed flight, where Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier in October 1947 and a series of “X-planes” were expanding the limits of flight in all directions. Responsibility for flying the experimental research aircraft at Edwards was divided three ways. When a new plane was delivered, its first flights would usually be conducted by company test pilots from its manufacturer. These pilots would have been involved in the design process and worked closely with the engineers responsible for the plane. During this phase, the stability, maneuverability, and behaviour of the plane in various flight regimes would be tested, and all of its component systems would be checked out. This would lead to “acceptance” by the Air Force, at which point its test pilots would acquaint themselves with the new plane and then conduct flights aimed at expanding its “envelope”: pushing parameters such as speed and altitude to those which the experimental plane had been designed to explore. It was during this phase that records would be set, often trumpeted by the Air Force. Finally, NACA pilots would follow up, exploring the fine details of the performance of the plane in the new flight regimes it opened up. Often the plane would be instrumented with sensors to collect data as NACA pilots patiently explored its flight envelope. NACA's operation at Edwards was small, and it played second fiddle to the Air Force (and Navy, who also tested some of its research planes there). The requirements for the planes were developed by the military, who selected the manufacturer, approved the design, and paid for its construction. NACA took advantage of whatever was developed, when the military made it available to them. However complicated the structure of operations was at Edwards, Crossfield arrived squarely in the middle of the heroic age of supersonic flight, as chronicled (perhaps a bit too exuberantly) by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. The hangars were full of machines resembling those on the covers of the pulp science fiction magazines of Crossfield's youth, and before them were a series of challenges seemingly without end: Mach 2, 3, and beyond, and flight to the threshold of space. It was a heroic time, and a dangerous business. Writing in 1960, Crossfield notes, “Death is the handmaiden of the pilot. Sometimes it comes by accident, sometimes by an act of God. … Twelve out of the sixteen members of my original class at Seattle were eventually killed in airplanes. … Indeed, come to think of it, three-quarters of all the pilots I ever knew are dead.” As an engineer, he has no illusions or superstitions about the risks he is undertaking: sometimes the machine breaks and there's nothing that can be done about it. But he distinguishes being startled with experiencing fear: “I have been startled in an airplane many times. This, I may say, is almost routine for the experimental test pilot. But I can honestly say I have never experienced real fear in the air. The reason is that I have never run out of things to do.” Crossfield proceeded to fly almost all of the cutting-edge aircraft at Edwards, including the rocket powered X-1 and the Navy's D-558-2 Skyrocket. By 1955, he had performed 99 flights under rocket power, becoming the most experienced rocket pilot in the world (there is no evidence the Soviet Union had any comparable rocket powered research aircraft). Most of Crossfield's flights were of the patient, data-taking kind in which the NACA specialised, albeit with occasional drama when these finicky, on-the-edge machines malfunctioned. But sometimes, even at staid NACA, the blood would be up, and in 1953, NACA approved taking the D-558-2 to Mach 2, setting a new world speed record. This was more than 25% faster than the plane had been designed to fly, and all the stops were pulled out for the attempt. The run was planned for a cold day, when the speed of sound would be lower at the planned altitude and cold-soaking the airframe would allow loading slightly more fuel and oxidiser. The wings and fuselage were waxed and polished to a high sheen to reduce air friction. Every crack was covered by masking tape. The stainless steel tubes used to jettison propellant in an emergency before drop from the carrier aircraft were replaced by aluminium which would burn away instants after the rocket engine was fired, saving a little bit of weight. With all of these tweaks, on November 20, 1953, at an altitude of 72,000 feet (22 km), the Skyrocket punched through Mach 2, reaching a speed of Mach 2.005. Crossfield was the Fastest Man on Earth. By 1955, Crossfield concluded that the original glory days of Edwards were coming to an end. The original rocket planes had reached the limits of their performance, and the next generation of research aircraft, the X-15, would be a project on an entirely different scale, involving years of development before it was ready for its first flight. Staying at NACA would, in all likelihood, mean a lengthy period of routine work, with nothing as challenging as his last five years pushing the frontiers of flight. He concluded that the right place for an engineering test pilot, one with such extensive experience in rocket flight, was on the engineering team developing the next generation rocket plane, not sitting around at Edwards waiting to see what they came up with. He resigned from NACA and took a job as chief engineering test pilot at North American Aviation, developer of the X-15. He would provide a pilot's perspective throughout the protracted gestation of the plane, including cockpit layout, control systems, life support and pressure suit design, simulator development, and riding herd on the problem-plagued engine. Ever wonder why the space suits used in the X-15 and by the Project Mercury astronauts were silver coloured? They said it was something about thermal management, but in fact when Crossfield was visiting the manufacturer he saw a sample of aluminised fabric and persuaded them the replace the original khaki coverall outer layer with it because it “looked like a real space suit.” And they did. When the X-15 finally made its first flight in 1959, Crossfield was at the controls. He would go on to make 14 X-15 flights before turning the ship over to Air Force and NASA (the successor agency to the NACA) pilots. This book, originally published in 1960, concludes before the record-breaking period of the X-15, conducted after Crossfield's involvement with it came to an end. This is a personal account of a period in the history of aviation in which records fell almost as fast as they were set and rocket pilots went right to the edge and beyond, feeling out the treacherous boundaries of the frontier. A Kindle edition is available, at this writing, for just US$0.99. The Kindle edition appears to have been prepared by optical character recognition with only a rudimentary and slapdash job of copy editing. There are numerous errors including many involving the humble apostrophe. But, hey, it's only a buck.
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