Another Thing About Balloons: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 1955

 So if the Soviets said, in the summer of 1955, that they were going to launch an Earth satellite in September of 1957 as part of their contribution to the International Geophysical Year, and their progress was fairly public, and they actually proceeded to launch said satellite, where exactly is the "Sputnik surprise?" One way to answer this question is that the button for enabling Google's contextual links feature has moved down to the text box, and that I accidentally clicked it, and it added the links in the first line, and, really, their sheer inanity says it all.

Another is to post this clip of Tom Lehrer making fun of  

well, everybody, really. America, maybe. This is an extremely well known clip because just about everybody is embarrassed by the fact that a Nazi war criminal ended up in a prominent role in NASA. And then there's the ICBM and Huntsville, Alabama connections. Let's just not talk about it, m'kay? And then of course it is his rocket that is the only one available to put a satellite in orbit in the fall of 1957, or, as it happens, the winter of 1958, because the Navy's Vanguard program had ended up even further behind, somehow. 

The upshot here is that the United States had three separate space/intercontinental programs ongoing in 1957/8, that all three of them were behind, and, as per the topic of this week's appendix, the Air Force's rocket was, to coin a Fifties-style neologism, a ballissile, specifically the SM-65 Atlas. 

There's no explanation for this, but there is a reason for the non-explanation. The Atlas was Convair's missile, named for Floyd Odlum's Atlas Corporation. Here's the introduction to the Wiki biography of Floyd Odlum:

After struggling as a corporate attorney in Salt Lake City, Odlum received an offer of a job at a New York firm, and in 1921 became vice-president of his primary client, Electric Bond and Share Company. In 1923, Odlum, a friend, and their wives pooled a total of $39,600 and formed the United States Company to speculate in purchases of utilities and general securities. Within two years, the company's net assets had increased 17 fold to nearly $700,000.^[2] In 1928, Odlum incorporated Atlas Utilities Company to take over the common stock of his other company.

Odlum was 29 when he became vice-president of Electric Bond and Share, and he got rich mainly by shorting the market before the Crash of '29. His biography barely even mentions the key investment in this narrative, Consolidated Aircraft, which he merged with Vultee in 1943, and formed into General Dynamics in 1953. It has never been entirely clear to me why it made sense to anyone that it was Vultee taking over Consolidated, although Consolidated's major contract, the B-24, was an embarrassment in its own right, and even more so when the involvement of Edgar Kaiser, yet another unbelievable mid-century American business story with a somewhat inexplicable marriage narrative, is rolled into the story. I will refer the readers to the link, and hope that they come away, with, like me, the impression that a proper biography of Edgar Kaiser could only be a searing, muckraking list of respectable American names making dirty money. 

The reason that the B-24 is embarrassing is, essentially, that it was the latest manifestation of a persistent faith in "mass production" that led to the building of many, many combat unworthy, overweight bombers. Only the most avid of completists would go through the wreckage to find another level of embarrassment, the claim that the long-range performance of the B-24 was unique, and due to its aerodynamically-superior "Davis wing," and not the amount of fuel that well-built B-24s can carry, and, to a much lesser extent, its high aspect ratio wing. Wings that are longer than they are wide have a higher ratio of lift to parasitic drag at the expense of higher structural weight, and David R. Davis was a "prominent Los Angeles sportsman" who clearly had not the slightest understanding of aerodynamics, and from whom Consolidated spent a considerable amount of effort disentangling its reputation in the late Forties, utterly unsuccessfully given that it is the only thing about his life that the NYT obituary saw fit to mention.  

Given that Atlas development began only a decade after Consolidated was happily engaging with Davis and talking about aerodynamic pseudoscience, it is perhaps not surprising that it went through some vicissitudes in the mid-Fifties. The Atlas was sold in much the same way as the B-24, on the basis of a technological novelty that would permit Consolidated/Convair/General Dynamics to deliver a "one-and-a-half stage" intercontinental missile. Specifically, it had "balloon" tanks of half-millimeter thick hard stainless steel that could only maintain their shape when pressurised. This would make the Atlas a very light missile for its payload. Chaining through Wiki links, I find that the balloon tank was the inspiration of Karel Jan Bossart, a Belgian-born aerodynamicist who transitioned into rocket development from aircraft structural work, unlike other pioneers like v. Braun, who came out of the rocket-engine development field. His Wiki, which I assume is based on the principal's views, asserts that Bossart was looking for a "monocoque" rocket design. "Monocoques" are just strength shells, in which stresses on a structure are carried by their surfaces, and the reference carries me back to my graduate student days when I was trying to grapple with Corelli Barnett's confident assertion that the DC-3 was such a technological novelty in Britain because it used a "moncoque" structure that the "conservative" British aviation establishment had hitherto rejected. 

I know, I know, Barnett of the Telegraph objecting to a "conservative" establishment. Historians of technology are weird. Also, to be technical about this, the whole thing is a distinction without a difference. Even the fabric skins of WWI biplanes provided added structural strength, while the "stress skin" of the DC-3 had plenty of internal bracing. Bossart became the Technical Director at Aerodynamics at General Dynamics in 1958, and the Atlas became, while a useless ICBM, became a family of respectable space launch system, albeit mostly after dropping the balloon tank angle, while Odlum will be remembered for, it says at Wikipedia, investing in the Broadway show, The Pajama Game, leading to the career of Shirley Maclaine. (Remember her? She was a Hollywood flake!). 

I promised myself that I wasn't going to bring up Noel Pemberton Billing's "Cult of the Clitoris," the theory that the anti-(technological)progress, pro-German cabal at the heart of British aviation was a secret society of lesbians, but musical theatre? It's getting hard to believe that Odlum didn't have a secret boyfriend. 

(100% straight.)

 Anyway, it all worked out perfectly for Bossart, the Atlas, and General Dynamics. This was about the time that the B-58 program was in full swing, and I have some vague recollection that the B-58/B-70/SR-71 might have had balloon tank-like fuel tanks, but I can't find confirmation. Bossart seems to have been involved in putting balloon tanks into the Atlas's "half-stage" second stage, the Centaur, but it is better known for using cryogenic fuels, which Bossart was also keen on. There's a lot of detail in the Wiki article about the ongoing development and progress of cryogenic fuel applications in orbit and beyond, and it's all a very worthy follow on to the original inspiration of David R. Davis, in much the same way that I've got a lot of mileage out of The Periscope's ongoing series of three-martini lunches with whoever its source in the Air Force's "balloons are cool" community might have been. 

History of technology is fun when it involves brainstorming silly ideas that don't lead to people getting blown up, and I can't think of anyone who would object.

Oh, right. The taxpayers. Whatever. They can always vote for the other guy.   

I guess if the other party nominates a bald guy, you can take a fling on one, too. 

In other news, I now have Aviation Week as through October. Still trying to get my hands on Fortune. It seems like one of the libraries is using notifications on my library account instead of emails. I assume I missed them the last time the requested volumes of Fortune were available.