“He was always, it seems to me, about five or six years ahead of everybody else.”Īs an advisor on the secret ICBM program, Allen was well aware of the warhead reentry problem, and it was exactly the kind of situation where he thrived. “Harvey was so broad in his ability to think,” remembers fellow Ames aerodynamicist Jack Boyd. Before the first sonic booms echoed over Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, Allen was thinking about how to break the sound barrier, and by 1952, as chief of the Ames High-Speed Research Division, he was exploring the field of hypersonics-flight at then-unattained speeds above Mach 5. He had helped design the P-51 Mustang, one of World War II’s most successful fighters. One colleague recalls his beef bourguignon as “the best I’ve ever eaten.”īut his true genius was aeronautics. For his dinner guests, who sometimes numbered in the dozens, Allen would cook exotic meals ranging from Scandinavian dishes to Creole gumbos. He also loved Asian culture, and on a trip to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat bought so much furniture that he had to add a couple of rooms onto his Palo Alto house to contain it. Talking to him, colleagues sensed his agile mind in conversation he might jump from aerodynamics to Rachmaninoff (an accomplished pianist, Allen would play a piece and challenge friends to guess the composer). Julian Allen, known to colleagues as Harvey, a nickname taken from the invisible rabbit in the Broadway play. He was an ebullient, larger-than-life Californian named H. There was such an engineer at the Ames Research Center, a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics facility near San Francisco where researchers were exploring the boundaries of high-speed flight. Something was wrong with the conventional wisdom, and finding a solution would take an unconventional thinker. But when models of needle-nosed shapes were tested in wind tunnels, the results were discouraging: At Mach numbers approaching those expected for a real ICBM reentry, the tips of the nose cones began to melt. Slamming into the upper atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound, the warhead would encounter tremendous friction, creating temperatures of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit.Ī protective nose cone would have to be created the question was, what kind? To minimize friction, conventional wisdom called for using the same kinds of low-drag shapes-thin, knife-edge wings and sleek, needle-nose bodies-being developed for experimental supersonic aircraft like the Douglas Skyrocket. But another problem was just as daunting: how to make sure the warhead survived its high-speed reentry from the edge of space. Creating a rocket with enough power and accuracy to lob a multi-ton nuclear warhead at targets in the Soviet Union, some 6,000 miles away, was challenging enough. In the spring of 1952, even as millions of Collier’s readers marveled at the magazine’s visions of the future, engineers were grappling in secret with the almost insurmountable difficulties of designing the first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). What happened during those nine years to change the shape of spaceflight? It had less to do with dreams of conquering Mars than with the infant science of hypersonics, a classified missile program, and a couple of visionary engineers. They came back to Earth not gliding on wings but dangling from parachutes. One was shaped like a bowling ball the other resembled a Styrofoam coffee cup. When the Soviet Union and the United States flew the first real spaceships just nine years later-far sooner than most experts had predicted in 1952-they were anything but sleek. Designed by German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, whose name was still unknown to most Americans, the Collier’s spaceship was a sleek, needle-nosed beauty its winged third stage would be piloted to a runway landing. “Man Will Conquer Space Soon,” blared the headline, above a painting of a multi-stage rocket with engines blazing, bound for orbit. The cover of the Maissue of Collier’s magazine made an audacious promise.
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