Today we are not talking about the BLUE STREAK so much as its guidance system, and we have been led to that discussion via a technology which was not used in it, the "tuning fork" gyroscope. My inspiration for this was taken from an article in Aviation Week about this new "gyratron" or "vibragyro," and an offhand mention of the fact that it had been tried by Smiths in the Smith's Automatic Pilot, SEP2 militarised as the RAF Mk10. The Sperry vibrayro of 1953 doesn't appear to have gone any further. The idea was revived by Westinghouse for the space programme in the 1960s, but it wasn't until they were made piezoelectric that they became common in such vital gyrostablising applications as electric skateboards.
So instead I'm going to talk about the technology that was used, and the concept of the BLUE STREAK as a total weapon system.
By Bubba73 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40142782 |
BLUE STREAK was originally pitched as part of a collaborative international programme, with the British taking on the IRBM role while the USAF moved directly towards the Atlas ICBM. This seems to have fallen afoul of the ambitions of the Army and the Redstone Arsenal and its associated v. Braun team, with the Navy getting roped in to make it two-to-one. The Thor project proposal then became a concrete proposal-to-tender once the Air Force decided that it needed to be in the game with the other services. BLUE STREAK was significantly beefier than its American counterparts, using two Rolls-Royce licensed LR-79 engines, firing together as opposed to pioneering two-stage rocket technology. This gave the proposed British IRBM a significantly greater range than even Thor, at the expense of more than doubling the takeoff acceleration to in excess of 18g. De Havilland Propellers got the prime contract, fresh off fucking up the Britannia (which, to be fair, was just asking for a rogering-over like all of the big early turboprop planes, Gannet excepted for some reason), and Sperry Gyroscope's British subsidiary got the guidance contract. I've found an interesting paper on the programme online, Benjamin Cole, "Soft Technology and Technology Transfer: Lessons from British Missile Development," (originally published in the Nonproliferation Review for Fall of 1998) from a fellow "independent researcher" with an interest in discovering what this experience tells us about the timeframe for a North Korean ICBM.
Compared with Rolls Royce and De Havilland, Sperry was soon identified as a weak sister in the development team. At one point in 1955 it came under heavy criticism for having only 10 engineers working on the programme, explaining that "numbers are not necessarily a criterion of progress. At this stage of a new project, we believe that quality of thinking is perhaps rather more imporatant than quantity." (Ibid, 7; original pagination, 62) Pathetic excuse making? WELL,
I mean, how hard can it be? Sperry intended to use a well established gyro, the Sperry Type B/RAF Mk. 10, and no, I have no idea why it is the same mark number as the then-current autopilot. The real design issue was the Ferranti-subcontracted integrated gyro-accelerometers, and a 1958 review focussed on a shortage of machine tools and testing facilities. Or, rather, it was with the 18 g acceleration requirement, which by 1958 had left the Type B behind. Sperry could have probably caught up, but not within the deployment time frame. This led Sperry to adopt the American "Kearfott T2502 gyro." Kearfott was new to me as I was reading, but still exists today, and even has a (useless) company history resource at its web page. It might have been a navy contractor back in the day? The eventual use of an American gyro represents an important datum in Coles' overall assessment of the likely path of "soft technology transfer" programmes and so bears heavily on any model of proliferation based on his work. It would therefore be considerable interest to know more about the "Kearfott T2502.' Thanks to a helpfully-posted Ministry of Aviation research note, (R. R. ALLAN, B.Sc., Ph.D, Kinematic Rectification in Damped Single-Axis Gyros" [1964] find the T2502 described as a "damped single-axis gyro of the fluid-floated type. Elliott Brothers worked extensively on interfaces with the T-2502 in 1962/3, and while it was otherwise working on BLUE STEEL and a VC10 autopilot. This is confirmed in Flight's 1960 Farnborough special issue, in which a visit to the Ferranti stand turned up numerous applications of the Kearfott gyro. At this point thinks make a bit more sense to the cynic, as we see the Ferranti subcontractor supplanting Sperry management and Sperry gadgets in favour of a license that held a brighter future for Ferranti. One wonders if, in the end, it was Kearfott's low profile that gave it the advantage, as a firm that would be more willing to play junior partner to Ferranti in a host of programmes more likely to survive the budgetary axe as of 1960.
The thumbnail of Ian Clark's 1994 Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, of which UBC's copy is held hostage by the robot uprising in the automated retrieval facility, says that the inertial navigation system played a role in BLUE STREAK's cancellation after the design was economised by removing the "insurance" of a second [clip ends], presumably guidance element. So one of the reasons for cancelling BLUE STREAK was that the prior cheaping out on the guidance system had led to concerns that it would miss Moscow after all. The Wikipedia article attributes cancellation to a combination of cost concerns, fears of pre-emption by a Soviet first strike, and interservice intrigue, with Mountbatten pressing for the Polaris solution. Clark is not cited in the Wiki article, but C. N. Hill's more recent Vertical Empire is, and I think that I will stretch my book budget to this more recent and economical offering and leave off this post for dinner.
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