“I think most of it went over his head. But he’s a pretty good joe for all that.”
October 19, 2000
Mojave, California
THE COMPANY NAME remained “RoboPlanes” partly because they had been too busy to change it, and partly because it provided a plausible cover for the research activities that now preoccupied the firm. The building itself had grown like some self-perpetuating modular monster, section after section being added, while six miles away, in a fenceenclosed facility, the early, small-scale test engines were roaring night and day.
Bob Rodriquez had gone through the mounds of hypersonic data, picking clusters of ideas just as a vintner harvests selected grapes for a special bottling. And he had gone through the vast complex of Vance Shannon, Incorporated, doing the same thing with engineers and scientists, dragging them off vitally needed, profitable projects from all over the country, and sequestering them in the RoboPlanes complex. In the process he had infuriated company managers everywhere, and oftentimes the engineers and scientists themselves were unhappy.
Until they got on the job, and saw what a monumental task and what a significant opportunity they had been given. No one had to come on an involuntary basis, but it was much like a domestic Operation Paperclip, the celebrated program at the end of World War II that brought brilliant engineers such as Wernher von Braun to this country. The people Rodriquez induced to come found the Mojave area to be rather austere, particularly if they had come from eastern facilities, but the challenge of the work was rich, and so were its material rewards. Bob’s wife Mae was brought in to create a luxurious (if still basically modular) housing complex, with first-class schools for the children. Mae used subsidies to lure wonderful first-line stores to the area. Totally unlike anything ever seen before in Mojave, they were intended to keep RoboPlanes’s employees happy, but benefited the entire county and soon were paying for themselves. She brought in ethnic restaurants, Thai, Vietnamese, even Burmese, to give a civilizing effect.
The combined costs of the effort were staggering, and even all of Harry Shannon’s managerial efforts could not convince the board of directors and stockholders that there would ultimately be a payoff. Instead, Harry, V. R., Steve, Bob, and Dennis pooled their fortunes and borrowed to their maximum capability to take the company private once again. The process took an agonizing ten months to complete, but it salved their consciences. No longer did they have to fear that they were dealing falsely with the stockholders.
Incredibly, there had already been totally unexpected spin-offs from the pursuit of both scramjet and UAV technology. These were already bearing a sufficient burden of the expenses to keep Vance Shannon, Incorporated, earning at roughly the same level as it had in the past. Their very earliest experiments with the scramjets had led to patents in ceramic technology that were directly applicable to cooking ware. These patents had been purchased by two different commercial firms, one foreign, one domestic, and the royalties were already rolling in. And just as young Rod Rodriquez had predicted, the civil demand for UAVs was growing exponentially. The damn things were so costeffective—they didn’t draw a salary, required minimum maintenance, and effectively multiplied a police force or a forestry unit using them by an order of ten or fifteen. If an airplane crashed in a deserted area, a single UAV could search the area, home on to its emergency beacon, use GPS to pinpoint the spot, and remain overhead for hours so that the rescue parties could come directly to it. The police used the same sort of surveillance for tracking stolen cars, staking out a suspect’s hideout, or simply providing a presence. The sound of a RoboPlane overhead quieted a lot of gang and narcotics activity on the streets, for they knew that it carried real-time television images direct not only to police stations, but to the local police cars. Periodically, the frustration level would rise, and someone would take a shot at the UAVs, but none had been lost so far. Perhaps not surprisingly, the media had caught on to the corny RoboPlane name, and it had become a generic for civilian UAVs. Rodriquez initially favored trying to protect the copyright, but soon they were in the same position as Xerox had been with other copy machines. It didn’t matter who made the copier, people called it “Xeroxing” and that was it. The final convincing straw was the prevalent rumor that a film was being made called “RoboPlanes” and featuring an android UAV that somehow falls for a good-looking woman detective. RoboPlane’s lawyers had sent a letter of protest, but there was no reply and Rodriquez, occupied with the challenge of hypersonic flight, told them to forget about it.
Their UAV experimentation had led to some totally new concepts in streamlining as well. The trucking industry had leaped upon their developments with glad cries. Unimaginably, some of the same principles that applied to a fifty-pound UAV could be extrapolated to the cab and the undersurfaces of an eighteen-wheel truck, cutting drag and resulting in substantial fuel savings. These fairings had a side benefit for the truckers, for they provided a space where some quarters, quite luxurious compared to the usual truck-stop motel, could be fitted.
Harry had long since realized that these benefits were just the iceberg’s tip, for the engineers and scientists that Rodriquez had dragooned into the UAV and the hypersonic programs had a wide variety of interests, and each one sought to apply what he or she was learning to their previous company projects. The more they worked, the more they explored, the more derivative products there would be. The most bizarre example so far had been a totally inexplicable spin-off that made the inventor rich and added to RoboPlanes’s coffers. It involved a new and better pop-top for cans, and derived from a valve they were developing for the scramjet. Another huge surprise was the television sale of remote control models. Harry hated the huckster part of the business, but there was no denying the comfort it provided the bottom line.
There were far fewer successes with the furious level of scramjet experimentation. The local facility had proved inadequate, and a newly built one, located fifteen miles away in the desert, was testing the larger engines. The move was necessary, for even the most elaborate mufflers and diligent buffering could not silence the incredible shrieking noise of scramjets operating in the wind tunnels. Even worse, frequencies far too high to be heard caused a violent nausea for anyone not wearing the proper ear protection. Everyone at the new facility—a combination of large and small supersonic wind tunnels and engine test bays—wore both earplugs and helmets, but still suffered from the fatigue induced by the incredible panoply of noise. There was an odd side effect, totally unexpected, on automobile and truck tires, which suffered internal fatigue and sometimes failure from the high-frequency vibrations.
Bob Rodriquez, Sr., had already made his morning round of every building in the facility, a habit he had picked up from Ben Rich at the Skunk Works. Like Ben, he bounded into each group with a grin and a new joke, and like Ben he absorbed in a glance how the group was doing. Facial expressions and body language often told him more than the endless stream of memorandums, and he had long since identified the players who made things happen, even in this super-select group.
Much of their progress had been made possible by early decisions that happened to work out. Had they failed, the project would probably have been abandoned by now. Working with O’Malley and Jenkins, Rodriquez established a series of goals for their missiles fleet. Among these were that most of the family would be stealthy, including the cruise missiles, the anti-cruise missiles, and the unmanned aerial vehicles. For the most part, stealth for the manned hypersonic vehicle would be provided by speed. It would be so fast that when it was picked up by radar, it would already be too late for an enemy to react. Then they decided that while they would use engines from established manufacturers—rockets and jets—for the missiles and the unmanned vehicles, they would create their own power-plant system for the manned hypersonic vehicles. Finally, and most difficult, they decided that if at all possible they would not use a rocket booster on the manned hypersonic vehicles, but instead use a combination fanjet/scramjet engine. The goal fr
om the start was that their vehicle would take off and land under its own power—no drops from mother planes, no engineless glides back to landing.
The basic simplicity of the scramjet engine continually amazed and frustrated the Shannon team, Rodriquez in particular. The very name “scramjet” infuriated him for its cuteness. It was a stretch for an acronym, standing for Supersonic Combustion Ramjet. A scramjet engine consisted of an inlet, a combustion chamber, fuel injectors, and a thrust nozzle. The scramjet engine ingested air at supersonic speeds, allowed it to flow around a fixed nozzle where fuel was injected, combustion occurred, and thrust was produced. The designs that spoke to Rodriquez were all “waveriders,” meaning that the underside of the vehicle formed the intake and the nozzle of the engine. The waverider was an exciting shape, a speedster riding its own shock wave like a surfboard riding the monster waves on Oahu’s North Shore. He had investigated reams of data, and in the previous three months had worked himself all the way back to some canceled projects. They gave him some insight for a totally new, if very high risk, approach, and today his task was to sell the rest of his team on the concept.
Rodriquez walked into the conference room, ordinarily spic and span, but this morning littered with empty coffee cups and papers from the all-night meeting that had just ended.
“Thank God nobody smokes anymore. This place would be intolerable if they did.”
Rodriquez quickly tidied up the smaller conference table, placed three chairs around it, and deposited one of his files at each position. As he finished, Jenkins and O’Malley walked in, both looking pleased with themselves, but both obviously very tired.
After the usual greetings and inquiries, Rodriquez said, “Harry is under the weather, but told me I had his proxy to vote for whatever we decide here.”
Harry attended fewer and fewer of their meetings. The new enterprise initially gave him both energy and strength, but the intensity of the program was beginning to sap his vitality. They knew he was going to the doctor, getting checkups, but Harry was closemouthed about such private matters. They guessed that something was wrong.
“Before we get started, Dennis, Harry told me to congratulate you on the hundredth flight of the Space Shuttle.”
The Space Shuttle Discovery had launched after delays, and encountered difficulties almost immediately when their rendezvous radar failed. They docked manually with the International Space Station and successfully transferred their main cargo, key building materials.
“Tell him thanks, but I’m not personally responsible. When you consider they had planned to make the hundredth flight in 1979—not 2000—it is not too shiny.”
O’Malley said sadly, “What is shiny? I’m still in shock from the second Osprey crash.”
On April 8, the Marines had been simulating a search and rescue mission with two V-22s near Marana, Arizona. Descending swiftly, perhaps two thousand feet per minute, the right rotor of the second V-22 stalled, rolling the airplane over and plunging 245 feet to the ground. Nineteen men were killed, and the program was once again under risk of cancellation.
“It was the typical vortex ring state incident. But there may have been some interplay with the rotor-wash of the other V-22. I hope they sort this one out fast, otherwise the program might go down the tubes.”
Dennis Jenkins, always upbeat, said, “Steve, there is lots out there that’s shiny. Boeing’s got its Airborne Laser 747 flying, and that is a big leap forward. They delivered number four thousand of your favorite airplane, the F-16—what a coup acquiring that program was for Lockheed—a gold mine! The Joint Strike Fighter competition is under way, and both the Boeing and the Lockheed Martin entries look pretty good.”
Rodriquez snorted. “Well, maybe Lockheed’s looks good; the Boeing job is funny-looking. But I’m sure it will fly well.”
It was true—the Boeing entry had a peculiar, snub-nosed look that was uncharacteristic of the firm’s usual comely designs. The Lockheed Martin JSF naturally looked much like the F-22.
O’Malley, casting around for something to make his “not shiny” remark valid, said, “Don’t forget the Concorde crash near Paris! That’s hardly shiny.”
Rodriquez gently tapped on the table.
“Enough of the griping, guys. Look in your folder. We’ve had far too many meetings on this, and I’d like to get agreement today so that we can start cutting metal on our Big Baby.”
Rodriquez had given each of their projects nicknames—“Deathblow” for the hypersonic cruise missile, “Little Slicker” for the anti-cruise missile, and “Big Baby” for their manned hypersonic vehicle.
O’Malley didn’t like the practice and said so. “Look, Bob, you can call it anything you want, but we’ve got to have a salable name for the project when we take it forward. ‘Big Baby’ just doesn’t cut it.”
Jenkins said, “I agree. It doesn’t matter what we call them in-house, but somehow Big Baby doesn’t work for me, either. How about calling it something straightforward, like ‘Hypersonic Cruiser’? That’s sort of how we see it, don’t we, something analogous to a Navy cruiser, fast, long range, lots of firepower?”
Rodriquez, embarrassed, shrugged and said, “OK. From now on it’s the Hypersonic Cruiser. Not a bad name, if it’s OK with you, Steve?”
Steve nodded brusquely, saying, “We’ve got the name, but before we cut any more metal, we should be sure that we all understand just how risky this enterprise is. We are trying to do for millions what the government has failed to do with billions. We can wind up bankrupting ourselves and in debt, if any one of a thousand things goes wrong.”
“We knew that from the start, Steve; we knew that when we privatized the firm. What’s new?”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and rich is better than poor. And even if I didn’t know this, Sally reminds me about twenty times a day.”
Rodriquez stood up, suddenly realizing that O’Malley was dead serious.
“Do you want us to stop? We could shut down all our hypersonic work, keep the UAV work going, send everybody back where they came from, and not get hurt too bad. In fact, I think we’ve already got enough possibilities from the spin-offs to recover our costs.”
O’Malley shook his head. “No, we’re in this for keeps, I know that. I just want to be sure you know it, so there’s no bitching if we go belly up.”
Jenkins said, “Let’s get to work. No bitching allowed.”
Rodriquez said, “Before we start going through the folders, let me tell you my starting point, and what the basic idea is. It seems so good and so logical to me that there must be something wrong with it, and if you think so, I want you to speak up. Not that any of you are ever very reticent.”
The three men nodded at him. Rodriquez was always intense, but when he was passionately involved in an idea he seemed to grow in size. He leaned forward, face darkening with color, and talked more and more rapidly. Normally they’d signaled him to slow down, and he would, but moments later would be back, speeding on, the words flying out, his hands racing over the blackboard, charting numbers and formula.
“I think I’ve found the route for us to follow. It’s hard to believe, for it goes all the way back to 1948 and the Republic XF-103. Any of you remember it?”
Only Jenkins spoke. “Sure, it was an advanced Mach 3.0 interceptor. And it was canceled—just too advanced to even try to build.”
“That’s right. It was way ahead of its time and it led to some other projects. It had a phenomenal projected performance because it used a dual-cycle propulsion system. The main engine was the Wright XJ67-W-3 turbojet that put out about twenty-two thousand pounds of thrust with afterburning. At high speed, it used a ramjet that put out another eighteen thousand pounds of thrust. But here is the kicker: at high speed, they had the air bypass the engine compressor and turbine, and used the afterburner as a ramjet combustion chamber. Then Republic went on, using this same kind of thinking, to develop an even more advanced proposal in 1962, the so-
called Aerospace plane. It had ideas that we can adapt directly to the Hypersonic Cruiser.” It was the first time he had used the term and he liked the way it rolled off his tongue. He looked around at expressions that were friendly but skeptical.
O’Malley said, “What’s the application here, Bob?”
“Look, we’ve been looking at wave-rider technology, using the bottom of the fuselage as engine component. We can stick to that, but let’s locate the fan-jet engine in the rear of the vehicle behind the nozzle for the scramjet. Let me show you my sketches—it will be easier to visualize than just my talking. Open up your folder to page six.”
They did as he asked, and O’Malley whistled at the sheer audacity of the concept.
“You can see that we’ve retained the traditional wave-rider shape—pilot in an escape capsule well forward, dual nose gear aft of the capsule, and the two fan-jets arranged on either side of the fuselage. But what is different is our enclosing the area aft of the scramjet by a cowling. In effect, we are hooking up an afterburner concept to the scramjet. If my computations are correct, and you’ll find them over the next fourteen pages, we will get roughly 50 percent more power and 50 percent better fuel economy.”
Jenkins slapped himself on the forehead.
“You are trying to do with a scramjet what they did with the fan jet.”
“No, I think I’m reversing that. The fan jet bypassed air, adding to the mass flow and getting a free ride. In this one we are introducing more fuel, just like an afterburner, but the numbers show you are getting a far greater return. It sounds impossible, but the numbers are there.”
O’Malley’s voice was somber.
“This thing is huge; the fuselage is almost one hundred feet long.”
“We can make an itty-bitty one like Boeing’s X-43A. It doesn’t carry anybody, and it malfunctioned on its first flight. We have no chance to make a conventional development program like the Air Force would demand. We can go for broke, or we ought to get out of the business. You know exactly what we are doing. We are depending upon computers for research that used to be done in wind tunnels and in test flights. We’ll never get where we want to go with conventional processes. Either we are right in what we glean from the computers, or we will fail in a spectacular manner.”
Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age Page 29
