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October 30 - October 31, 2018
“This is absolutely intolerable,” Joseph Stalin said. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde; but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable?”
Ruina, a disciple of Herbert York’s, wanted to create a science agency that served national security, while Godel wanted to build a national security agency served by scientists. The battle over those competing visions would characterize the agency’s future.
Interesting
SAGE was the first demonstration of interactive computing, where users could give commands directly, and time-sharing, where multiple users could work with a single computer.
the problem was that Rand, which Baran joked stood for “research and no development,” could not create such a system on its own.
came on November 30, 1961, when President Kennedy secretly authorized the use of chemical defoliation in Vietnam.
Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., chief of the New Jersey State Police, was sent to Iran to help to remake the gendarmerie “in the mold of the New Jersey State Police.” Schwarzkopf, whose son would lead American forces in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, was credited with remaking the gendarmerie into an effective counterinsurgency force that put down tribal rebellions in Kurdistan and Iranian Azerbaijan.
Slote seemed puzzled that an imprisoned Vietcong fighter being interviewed by a man hired by the Defense Department to quiz him about penises and vaginas would be so reticent.
The military services were grasping at technological solutions, yet Deitchman understood that the problem the military increasingly faced was one that defied modern weaponry.
AGILE under Godel had been run like an intelligence operation, employing local contacts, like a Thai prostitute who was coordinating the river surveillance project. The prostitute spoke Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and English and knew all of the key people in the region, according to Warren Stark, the AGILE program manager.“Sy Deitchman was aghast that he would have someone like that on the payroll,” Stark said.
In Washington, the key to killing something controversial is to never admit you actually killed it. To do that, you first change the name. Perhaps a year later you change the name again, to confuse those who might be tracking it. Then you kill it. By that point, most people will have forgotten about it.
Within a few years, Vidal’s research yielded promising results: in one experiment, test subjects were able to move an electronic object through a maze on a computer screen just by thinking about it.
ARPA programs, like biocybernetics, were often outrageously optimistic on military applications.
challenge of biocybernetics was weighing the fantastical applications it offered—brain-driven computers and mind-controlled aircraft—with the reality that such work was decades away. For example, according to a 1975 summary, ARPA hoped to achieve a capability to translate an eight-word vocabulary based on EEG signals. “The discipline of biocybernetics is essentially being created by ARPA,” the program summary at the time stated.
settled on a barren area of Nevada pocked with dry lake beds. They named it Paradise Ranch; Johnson later called the name a “dirty trick” to help attract people to what was an otherwise inhospitable area. For decades its existence was not acknowledged by the government, even as conspiracy theorists, press, and tourists made pilgrimages to the edge of the restricted zone, well aware that secret work was going on inside.
Myers, who had flown combat missions in both World War II and the Korean War, was on a one-man mission to sell his concept for a small, radar-evading aircraft inspired by an invisible rabbit named Harvey. In the 1950 James Stewart movie of the same name, Harvey was a six-foot-tall “pooka,” a mythical creature only the protagonist could see. Myers’s pooka was much like Stewart’s—an invisible plane, or a “stealth aircraft.”
wanted DARPA to go back to its roots, or at least what Schlesinger believed were its roots. “He wanted more technology there,” Heilmeier said. “He didn’t want a lot of work done in foreign policy by a technical agency.”
Brown, Lockheed’s chief engineer, estimated that Ufimtsev’s theory contributed about “30 percent” to Lockheed’s stealth calculations. “It wasn’t like the Russians saved us,” Brown said.
resulting design, created to test stealth and not its ability to fly, was faceted like a diamond and shaped like a sort of swept-back pyramid. “Well, that’s stupid. We’ll never make that fly,” was the reaction from Lockheed’s designers, recalled Brown. “They christened it the Hopeless Diamond.” The name Hopeless Diamond
Over at the Pentagon, DARPA’s director, Cooper, and other senior officials—including Secretary of Defense Weinberger—sat slack-jawed as they tried to digest the president’s address. The president had just made one of the most significant military technology decisions of the past few decades without consulting the key people in the Pentagon responsible for that technology. “Everybody including DeLauer and myself were completely blindsided by it,” Cooper recalled.
duPont believed he had a design that could do it. His idea was to build a space plane powered almost entirely by a hybrid scramjet surrounded by ejectors channeling rocket exhaust. Rather than a big external booster, the duPont engine would incorporate a small rocket to power the aircraft until it reached high enough speeds that the scramjet could kick in, boosting the plane into orbit. It was a novel concept but also incredibly complex.
phrase “convinced ourselves” was an unintentionally apt description. At that point, the scramjet engines that would propel the plane into orbit had never actually been tested in flight. Yet officials gripped by the technological optimism inspired by Reagan were enthused.
Copper Canyon’s growth from a small space plane to an Orient Express was an appropriate reflection of Cold War excess under Reagan, whose vision of technology, whether space weapons or space planes, was never constrained by the laws of physics.
