War Balloons and Satelloons! A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955

 

That's "Fu-Go," not "Fugu." Those wacky Japanese! So I hope that the readers have been as struck as I have been by The Periscope's ongoing obsession with balloons. Since the column has been talking up balloon-carried H-bombs as an Air Force project, this isn't necessarily all about the Skyhook programme, but Periscope is definitely on that case, too, with its talk of the programme setting an altitude record soon, and reaching 250 miles altitude, which is why you should never have a third martini when you're having lunch with your sources. I mean, there was a time when cementing your name in history as the dumbest nepo baby ever was a potential achievement, but nowadays we've got Larry Summers. In conclusion, why even try?

The walk along the new lakeshore in downtown Nakusp. The Upper Arrow is mostly too cold for cherry trees to fruit, though.

Just go somewhere that's a ferry from anywhere and wait for this whole "Western Civilisation" thing to blow over. Bring some books. And lots of flour, Spam, peas, and lard.  You'll be fine.

I suspect that the Skyhook programme is mainly famous at this point for being behind the Roswell. Anyway, they did launch Deacon sounding rockets from the Skyhook platform in a series of trials  in 1952, but per the Wikipedia article on the "rockoon," further experiments were deterred by the fact that no-one knew quite where the balloons would end up, never mind the rockets launched from them, and so thorough trials of the concept had to wait until the USCGS Eastwind was safely positioned off Greenland. Once "potted" in cans of heated orange juice (it says here, so it must be true), a series of launches from 70,000ft went forward and the rockets all, uhm, did the thing. This was actually a follow-up of an ONR launch series that was also conducted off the coast of Greenland in 1955, which I do not see referenced under the Skyhook programme, or, rather, the Wiki about same.  The article goes on to say that a giant Mylar balloon developed by the G. T. Schejeldahl Corporation of Northfield, Minnesota, and operated by the University of Minnesota, reached an "unofficial ballon altitude record of 145,000ft" in September, 1956. I don't see what that has to do with the Skyhook, which was a General Mills product, or the Navy, but it is kind of an altitude record.

T. Keith Glennan shows the President satelloon glue.

By the way, since I know that you will all want to know this, besides giant Mylar ballons, Gilmore Schjedahl was responsible for inventing the airline barf bag. (If anyone ever asks you how you get into the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame, that's how.) Or producing them, anyway, plus all the early "balloon" signal-reflecting satellites (satelloons!), which seemed like a great idea until it was discovered that the solar wind was blowing them out of their planned orbits.   

It turns out that there was an Air Force balloon programme, PROJECT GENETRIX, which was a precursor of the U-2, also made by General Mills. Skyhooks quite publicly carried astronomical telescopes into orbit, while the GENETRIX balloons carried cameras and "other electronic equipment." They were launched from Lowry AFB on Colorado, but also from sites in Norway, Scotland, West Germany, and Turkey, so at least this part seems to be a genuine Periscope scoop. It says (in Wikipedia again) that the President didn't authorise the programme until December, 1955, but I'm a bit dubious that Ike was authorising  much of anything in December, and the Eisenhower Administration's "Open Skies" policy goes back to the Geneva talks and the President's version of "test, but verify." 
 

Remember how much money GDW threw away on this in the
mid-Eighties?

It also turns out that there was a balloon bomb  project, "Weapon System 124A," or FLYING CLOUD. The Wiki (again) says that after tests in late 1954, "the project was found to be unfeasible from the standpoint of accuracy." It goes on to explain the rationale, which was to extend the atomic bombing of the Soviet Union into the "broken back" phase of WWIII. You know, the pre-post-apocalyptic phase in which all the good nukes have gone to the good targets, but the war is still going on for some reason. So instead of tiny remnant armies clashing in Germany and Poland, you could have America's ongoing atom bomb production raining down randomly wherever the trade winds blew. 

Although in defence of FLYING CLOUD planners, they were intending to  use chemical, biological, and maybe radiological payloads, and not H-bombs. 

 In conclusion, that was a pretty entertaining way to spend a few hours. Fifties apocalypse planning is funny because it didn't happen. Then. 

Finally, in robot uprising news, I've sent in a request for the 1955 numbers of Engineering, which is even more boring than The Engineer, but might be in an ASRS aisle that the library cycles more often than biweekly and counting. Maybe they only operate the machinery when they have enough requests? It would explain why the library staff are so evasive about when these requests might be filled.