FTV: Dyna-Soar

     

     When I taught my students about the evolution of NASA’s Manned Flight Program, I would mention a project called Dyna-Soar.  I had read snippets about it but never knew many of the details until I read General Chuck Yeager’s biography (Yeager – 1985 – C.Yeager & L.Janos – Bantam Books).  Yeager’s life and career as an Army Air Corp pilot during World War II have been topics in this space before (FTV:  Yeager 4-23-25 and FTV:  Air Combat 6-18-25).  After he became what is commonly referred to as a ‘Bird-Colonel’ in 1967 (a name derived from the silver wings insignia worn by a full Colonel), his flying time became secondary to his new administrative position at Edwards Air Force Base in California.  Yeager still managed to fly a lot (nothing would keep him from that) but what I found interesting about this phase of his career was an Air Force program that very few people have even heard of.  

     In order to put this all into perspective, we need to go back twenty years before Chuck became Col. Yeager.  The term ‘Space Age’ was officially coined after the first artificial satellite (USSR’s Sputnik) was orbited on October 4, 1957.  Yeager notes that plans for an Air Force presence in space were being drawn up as early as 1947, shortly after he made his historic Mach 1 flight on the Bell X-1.  The armed forces were making plans to conquer space well before humans put anything in orbit around the Earth and the ‘Space Age’ title was born.

     In 1947, there wasn’t an entity called NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).  The organization that President Eisenhower would rebrand NASA was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA – founded in 1915).  NACA was a federal agency whose mission was to ‘undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research’ according to our friends at WIKI.  The Bell civilian pilots designated to try and break the sound barrier were nearing what some experts warned it might be an impenetrable ‘wall’.  When one of the Bell pilots demanded a $100,000 stipend to undertake the dangerous task of flying the X-1 past MACH 1, finishing the job was handed off to the U.S. Air Force.  The Air Force’s choice to make the historic flight was Chuck Yeager.

     The Air Force think tank began pondering what the next advancement in aviation would be in light of the successful breaching of the sound barrier.  Like many of his accomplishments, Yeager’s entry into the Space Race was through the back door.  It all started when his good friend (and pioneering woman aviator) Jackie Cochran approached the Air Force Chief of Staff and requested Chuck’s presence at an aviation conference in Spain.  The purpose of the meeting was to finalize the criteria used to determine aviation records.  Cochran told General Tommy White, “Yeager is the only one who the Russians respect for his experience in high-speed airplanes.  He can explain the problems and get them to agree.”  Gen. White said, “I don’t see why Chuck can’t go,” and he wired the War College test pilot school (where Yeager was taking advanced courses relating to the newer high-speed jets). 

     When the War College commandant refused the request, White pulled rank:  “Publish orders on Yeager in my name and send him.”  Yeager spent his test pilot school time well flying every plane he could  (“Not playing golf like the younger guys,” he said) so even with his trip to Spain, he passed with the highest marks.  “The school never forgave me,” he said, “but I went with Jackie to Madrid and we got everything jelled on the FAI records, including a Russian agreement to recognize fifty-miles high as ‘space’.”  Yeager looks back at this time period and says whether he knew it then or not, these were his first steps toward his later role training Air Force pilots to fly in space.

      After WWII, Yeager had been assigned as a test-pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California where they were testing the first research rocket aircraft, the Bell X-1.  After breaking the MACH 1 barrier, he went on to be the first to fly at MACH 2 in the next generation Bell X-1A on December 12, 1953.  He was later deployed in Germany at Hahn Air Base, then to George AFB in California, and later to Moron AFB in Spain.  In spite of ‘skipping school’ to go to Spain with Jackie Cochran, he graduated from the Air War College at Maxwell AFB, Alabama in June of 1961.  He was named commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards AFB in July of 1962.  At ARPS, he was put in charge of training all military astronauts. 

     The Air Force wasn’t interested in going to the Moon.  They viewed space as an opportunity to train pilots to be pioneers on the next frontier.  They wanted to put the first men in space, and according to Yeager, “We had plans on the board since 1947 for orbiting military space stations manned with our own (Air Force) astronauts.  We knew the Russians had similar plans and we aimed to beat them to it.  All we needed was a green light from Congress and the White House.”

The only thing stopping them was the curveball President Eisenhower pitched them – he put the United States Space Program in civilian hands when he converted NACA into NASA in 1958.

     The Air Force plans were ambitious.  Yeager described the ARP school:  “It was a historic first step for putting the Air Force in space.  At that point, little was known about the rigors of space travel and the ability of astronauts to sustain long periods of weightlessness.  These unknowns awaited future testing and evaluation, but in the meantime, we decided to train a first generation of military aerospace pilots in the highly precise and disciplined flying demanded by orbiting space labs and transportable shuttles.  The course work was high-powered engineering  and flight mechanics, and the training would preview the new techniques needed to fly in space.”  Yeager left the heavy lifting (the academic part of the curriculum) to his instructors while he managed the program and made sure he flew with every pilot to assess their skills.  He had flown to the edge of space in the Bell X-1A and his high profile name gave him the leverage he needed to equip ARP school with the best equipment.

     The Air Force brass were not keen on giving up their shot at space to a bunch of civilians so they were receptive to what Yeager said they needed.  He requested a computerized space mission simulator to expose the students to a space environment.  “We received four million dollars to convert three Lockheed Starfighters, the F 104,” Yeager recounted.  “We equipped them with six-thousand-pound thrust rocket engines and hydrogen peroxide reaction controls on the nose and wings – the cheapest way we knew to give a student a minute and a half of zero-Gs.  

The airplane would get him up to 100,000 feet in an inflated pressure suit, and he could practice maneuvering with his reaction controls just as if he were in a space capsule.”  His staff of thirty included instructors Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, and Jim McDivitt who would all go on to join NASA’s astronaut corps.

     The program was swamped with applicants and the enrollees were pretty much cream of the crop Air Force pilots.  Make no mistake – the training was also dangerous:  “After graduating, Major Mike Adams had the chance to fly the new X-15 or become an astronaut.  He chose the X-15 but was killed in it a few years later.  Another notable graduate turned astronaut was Col. Dave Scott. It was Scott who took over the controls on Gemini VIII when he and Neil Armstrong went into an uncontrollable tumble due to a stuck thruster.  David took over and righted that thing and got them back safely.”  

     Yeager remembered an incident at the flight school when Scott and Adams were flying a two seater together:  “They were running low-lift drag ratio landings where they came in at a very steep angle and needed to flare the airplane, give it power, and go around and shoot another steep landing.  On one of these runs, they lost their engine.  The airplane hit the ground with a bash,  Mike Adams in the back seat ejected just before that thing hit, but David Scott didn’t.  It was amazing to me:  both guys made a split second decision that was absolutely correct.  And both were opposite courses of action. The rear cockpit crunched and if Mike had stayed he would have been killed.  If David had punched out, he would have been killed because when he hit, his seat was cocked sideways.  To me, that incident indicated their capability and future.” 

     The program hoped to produce the pilots who, within seven or eight years, would be manning labs in orbit, experimenting with lasers and particle beam weapons, and be ready to fly the X-20 Dyna-Soar (short for Dynamic Soarer).  This rocket plane was designed to be a lifting body.  A  precursor of the Space Shuttle, it would be rocketed into orbit and then return to Earth not by parachuting into the ocean, but flying back to a runway landing.  The development program for the X-20 ran from October 1957 to December 1963.  It was slated to be a multi-mission spacecraft capable of aerial reconnaissance, bombing, space rescue, satellite maintenance, and act as a space interceptor that could sabotage enemy satellites.  The Air Force spent $660 million on its development (equivalent to $6.78 billion in today’s dollars).  

      The concept for this craft was actually conceived in WWII Germany by Eugen Sanger and Irene Bredt for a program they called Silbervogel (‘Silver Bird’).  It was designed to be a rocket powered bomber that would cross the Atlantic at high altitude and bomb New York City.  It would continue on and land in Japanese held territory in the western Pacific.  It would then be refueled, re-armed, and sent back over the United States for another bombing run before returning to Germany.  The German High Command never warmed up to the project, preferring V-1 and V-2 rockets instead.  After the war, analysis of the design plans found a computational error that underestimated the heat load the Silbervogel would have generated re-entering the upper atmosphere.  The heat load generated would have destroyed it.

     Seven astronauts were secretly picked to train for the Dyna-Soar program, one of whom was future Moon walker Neil Armstrong.  Dyna-Soar was hampered by three problems – funding issues, uncertainty over which booster would be used to put the craft in orbit, and the lack of a clear goal or mission for the craft.  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara eventually pulled the plug.  The day the Dyna-Soar went the way of the dinosaurs, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was announced.  This was advertised as a ‘science platform’ but the Air Force really wanted a manned spy satellite.  When the technology was developed to build better cameras that could do the same job from orbit without a human presence, the MOL was also scrapped.  Even with these cuts, the Air Force still wasn’t out of the space game so the Edward’s AFB training program continued.

     The X-15 program kept gathering data about high-speed flight until 1968.  The last X-15 flights ended about the time Apollo 8 made their historic circum-Lunar flight in December of that year.  The Apollo program succeeded in putting twelve sets of human footprints as well as  Lunar Rover tire tracks on the Moon.  With congress getting jumpy about the cost of the program, the last three Apollo flights were canceled.  With the program being wound down, Eugene Cernan ended up being the last human to stand on the Moon’s surface on the Apollo 17 mission.  After the Apollo 11 flight, public apathy about space flight was becoming apparent.  There was a resurgence of interest when NASA fought successfully to return the crew of Apollo 13 to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded in the Service Module section.  They were already   halfway to the Moon and returning the crew safely branded the flight ‘a successful failure’.  Even though the science being done during the next flights was impressive, Congress got cold feet about the cost.  As soon as the last Apollo mission was launched, pink slips began appearing for people whose labors had made the Moon landing program a success.

     NASA administrator James Webb had seen to it that President Kennedy’s pledge to reach the Moon was met.  When Webb retired, Thomas Paine, his deputy, took the reins.  He was not about to let the end of Apollo define the future of NASA.  He laid out an agenda that called for new directions in the space program.  Paine’s plan included an orbiting space station, a Moon base, and a three part ‘Space Transportation System’ that would include a ‘space tug’ to ferry astronauts to the Lunar surface.  There was even talk of manned missions to Mars.  Noting the expense of the ‘one and done’ vehicles used up to then, Paine envisioned a reusable vehicle that would have a fast turn around and be cheaper to operate.  The only thing Paine didn’t plan for was the political climate.  There wasn’t a space fan like Kennedy cheerleading and pushing the program any more.  Richard Nixon, a president with little interest in the space program and a bent toward penny-pinching, was now the anchor holding NASA back.  Getting to the Moon was fine, but the American public showed little interest in sending men to Mars. 

     Paine had to abandon Moon bases, nuclear powered rockets, and the space tug.  The future of NASA was condensed to the ‘next’ vehicle on the drawing board.  It wasn’t even on the drawing board yet, but Paine turned to one of NASA’s best designers to develop what would eventually be called the Space Shuttle.  The first thing Max Faget did was craft a model using the ‘lifting body’ design first envisioned for the German Silbervogel bomber.  Max built the model and showed it to his design team in a window-less hanger named Building 36.  He held it aloft and flew it across the room in an arrow straight path.  To the astonishment of all present, he then tipped it sixty degrees toward the ceiling and repeated the flight.  Everyone understood what they saw – this craft would be able to push through the upper atmosphere with a profile that would not generate as much heat as the capsules he had previously designed or the flawed Silbervogel craft that was never built.  Now the NASA design team just needed to draw up plans for a full size orbiter using the concept of a lifting body.

      The first plan was grandiose.  A Boeing 747 size piloted craft would boost a smaller lifting body to an altitude where it could climb to orbit.  Both the booster and orbiter would return to a runway landing and be totally reusable.  It was ingenious and Paine wanted it flying by 1975,  but the $14 billion price tag wasn’t going to fly.  Many versions of the concept were prepared, and ironically, the Air Force managed to be the deciding voice in shaping the new Space Shuttle.  They insisted the bus-sized surveillance satellites they wanted to orbit (big enough to carry 27 miles of film) needed to fit in the cargo bay.  The ultimate size and weight of the orbiter was the determining factor in the use of two solid fuel boosters to get it off the pad.  

     Solid fuel rockets had never been used for manned flights, but they were cheaper than liquid fuel boosters.  They could not be shut down once fired but, unlike the external fuel tank, they were reusable.  Examination of the O-ring seals between the booster segments showed evidence that they did not seal completely in the first seconds after they were ignited.  Cold weather compounded this problem and the blow through created when the cold O-rings did not seal right away led to the the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger and crew on January 28, 1986.

     The final design of the Space Shuttle was inspired by the Silbervogel, but the end product was driven by budget cuts and compromises.  It was the most complex flying machine ever created.  If  NASA had not opted to use the simpler space capsule design in the early 1960s (to get astronauts into space sooner than later), America might have had an operational space plane much earlier.  The routine space truck missions never materialized and when the Space Shuttle was retired, conventional booster rocket / space capsule technology again became the path to space.  Unfortunately, the Shuttle was decommissioned before NASA had a suitable replacement meaning the USA had to purchase rides to the International Space Station from the Russian space program.  

     It is hard to say if the Dyna-Soar would have been a better ‘space truck’ than the Space Shuttle.  When Dyna-Soar was scrapped and the Shuttle fleet was decommissioned, the question became moot.  The lack of governmental support opened the door for companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to fill the role previously pioneered by the U.S. Air Force and NASA. 

Top Piece Video:  Okay, the Dyna-Soar would have gone higher than 8 miles, but we will settle for The Byrds last appearance on American Band Stand before David Crosby got himself fired!