Ejecting a Bear at Mach 2

The B-58 Hustler viewed from the Grissom Air Museum guard tower.

About a month ago I got the chance to visit the Grissom Air Museum which sits just over an hour away from Purdue. I was very excited because the museum boasted a variety of neat planes from fighter jets to commercial planes to a Lockheed D-21. It was a very neat museum, and really wonderful because most of the exhibits are out in a grassy field with a winding walkway through the planes. This gives you the ability to really get up close and personal with the planes. If you’re ever in the vicinity of Peru Indiana, I would highly recommend stopping by!

Besides the D-21, there was a very interesting exhibit in the outdoor park that wasn’t a plane: a supersonic rocket-powered test sled. This test sled is pictured below:

The B-58 Supersonic Test Sled

As you can see, it’s pretty much just a mock-up of the cockpit of a B-58 but put on rails. The special thing about this test sled though, is the tests it was utilized for.

This sled, known as the ‘Texas Hustler’ was designed and tested at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in the 1950’s. Its purpose was to test the emergency ejection system for the Convair B-58 Hustler, which was the first operational bomber that was capable of flying at Mach 2. This speed poses various engineering challenges from the standpoint of an emergency egress system, and they ran into nearly all of them. A standard ejection system, in which the crew-person’s seat is blasted out of the aircraft ensured nearly certain death at such speeds. To resolve this issue, the Stanley B-58 Escape Pod was developed.

The Stanley B-58 Escape Pod (Source)

In the event that the cabin became depressurized or an emergency ejection was necessary, this capsule would encapsulate the crew-person in a clamshell fashion. The telescoping doors you see on the right would close, and then the capsule would pressurize, a hatch would be blown off of the cockpit, and the capsule would be ejected. The system then became a little survival capsule for the crew-person, with a parachute, food, water, and oxygen. A similar system was made for the XB-70.

But this isn’t the end of the story. The real kicker of this whole experiment is how the Air Force chose to see if such an escape system was survivable. Such an unproven system cannot be tested on humans, and unfortunately the technology at the time meant an animal would be subjected to see if it would work. Like me, you might figure that they used a monkey, or maybe a pig to stand in for a human. Well, like me, you would be totally wrong and most likely very surprised that the Air Force instead tested this system using two bears, one named Yogi and one named Big John.

To conduct a test of the capsule, they would first drug Yogi or Big John, and then load one of them into the test sled. From there, the test sled would roar down a 4 mile long track, boosted by rocket motors to supersonic speeds, at which point the bear would ejected. Once these tests were verified, the bears were sent up in a B-58 fitted with the capsules. Yogi boasts an ejection speed of over 800 mph at 35,000 feet, while Big John boasts one over 1000 mph at 45,000 feet. From everything I can dig up on the internet, it seems that thankfully both bears survived and validated the emergency ejection system. To top off the whole experience, the Grissom Air Museum gift shop even has little toy stuffed bears that pay homage to Yogi and Big John.

So, I’ll reiterate: if you’re ever near Peru Indiana, I would highly encourage you to go see the rocket-powered B-58 test sled that ejected some bears at supersonic speeds. It certainly seems to be one-of-a-kind.

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Recently I got the chance to go back to the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It’s also a wonderful museum that is packed with all types of planes and really cool things, including many X-planes. Among the planes in one of the densely packed hangars however was a familiar friend: the B-58 Hustler, and its escape pod. Below is a picture of the one in Dayton:

The Stanley B-58 Escape Pod

The Mystery Pyramidal Rocket

It is a tradition for me to splurge on a bunch of books that arrive just in time for when I have a break, so in keeping with this tradition I ordered a veritable array just in time for the conclusion of my summer internship at Microsoft and my statics class. Among the pile now sitting at the base of my desk are these two books: Spaceflight Dynamics by William E. Wiesel and Control Systems Engineering by Norman S. Nise. Both of which immediately captivated me with their covers, as they both featured this oddly pyramidal rocket, that seemed to be a single stage and also looked like nothing else I had ever seen before. It was also interesting, as they appeared on two textbooks whose topics imply this vehicle was doing some very important and challenging things.

So, I took to Google to try to figure out what it was. I tried a lot of different searches, ranging from ‘NASA triangle rocket’ to ‘NASA concept reusable rocket’ and many more variations on the shape and purpose, but all I got was radio silence. It was like I was experiencing communications blackout in a re-entering Mercury capsule. I then tried googling the specific contents of the covers, and still no dice. I began reading Spaceflight Dynamics, scanning for any indication of what this mysterious machine was, but to no avail. As I’m writing this, I curiously checked the inside cover for Control Systems Engineering and it says exactly what it is and where the photos are from, which is slightly embarrassing for me, but my impatience and a circuitous route make for a better story.

After an arduous (5 minutes) amount of time poking around on the internet, I finally figured out what it was: the McDonnell Douglas DC-X. It was one of the first VTVL (vertical takeoff, vertical landing) rockets to be brought to life in the early nineties and was intended to be a reusable single-stage-to-orbit rocket that was devised by McDonnell Douglass in partnership with the DoD’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO). It later on fizzled out at SDIO and got passed on to NASA. The interesting part is that these two book covers actually tell a bit of this story. The image on the left for Control Systems Engineering is actually a composition of real images taken at a test launch at White Sands, New Mexico, when the project was still under SDIO. The image on Spaceflight Dynamics however clearly sports the NASA logo, and actually shows the DC-XA, with the ‘A’ standing for advanced, based on the changes in design NASA made.

Douglas SASSTO

DC stands for nothing more than ‘Delta Clipper’ according to Google, and is supposed to pay homage to the McDonnell Douglas line of famous airliners. The whole thing just looks fantastically futuristic, and I must say I am a big fan of the design. In researching this vehicle I also found out about the Douglass SASSTO (Saturn Application Single Stage to Orbit) launch system from 1967 which is also just bananas. The more amazing part is how some variations of the SASSTO look similar to New Shepard, or to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo today.

But, back to the DC-X. Thanks to YouTube, I was able to find the video of the flight that is actually on the cover of Control Systems Engineering. It’s given below, and I think you’ll find it really neat since it was so long ago. It’s especially neat given how Blue Origin and SpaceX have grown so much in the past decade as offering reusable systems. Speaking of which, it turns out when this program was scrapped by NASA, a lot of the engineers went to work for Blue Origin, and that a fair bit of the design of the DC-X inspired New Shepard. I think this is quite apparent in the landing legs myself.

Something else interesting about the DC-X is that it didn’t perform a flip maneuver - that is, it was planned to re-enter the atmosphere with it’s aft side down; hence why it had a head shield on the bottom of its pyramidal shape. This does however make sense because it has a large surface area so thus is can displace lots of heat, and it means less maneuvering, but it was different from the consensus at the time which is interesting.

The final neat couple of facts I’ll leave with you are that the eye-catching pyramidal shell was custom made by Scaled Composites (it all makes sense now), and that it used 4 Pratt and Whitney engines (according to Control Systems Engineering). A rather interesting part to all of this is that other sources say that is used 4 RL-10 engines which are made by Aerojet Rocketdyne. If anyone knows what it actually used, I would love to hear about it. Wikipedia, funnily enough, describes the rocket as being made from ‘off the shelf parts’. I’ll be quite happy just as soon as I can find on which shelves these parts can be found. Finally, it flew a total of 12 times, had some cute little control surfaces, and Pete Conrad was even present at some of the launches in New Mexico.

SpaceX Starship SN8 Launch!

Wow. Quite honestly, I was shocked in the best way possible while watching SpaceX’s Starship SN8 launch, reach an altitude of 12 km, and then fall gracefully back to Earth, nearly save itself, and then explode in a ball of fire. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend Googling it or watching any clip you can, because it is truly one of those things that you have to see to believe. I mean at its core, snate(my nickname for Starship SN8) is a stainless steel cylinder with a nose cone that nearly accomplished one of the most complex aeronautical vehicle maneuvers ever.

I think my favorite part of the launch was watching it fall back to Earth sideways. As snate descended, it looked almost as if it was floating; I think it’s an amazing feat of engineering to make something like that work. Not to mention when 2/3 Raptor engines reignited to so as to make snate stand upright again. That maneuver in itself just looked like pure magic. I had seen animations of how the Starship series was supposed to perform, but seeing it on a live broadcast. . . that was something else entirely.

As we look to the future of space exploration and where we might be in a couple decades, I wanted to document this moment so that I could look back on it. When they do successfully land a Starship, it’s going to be a ground breaking day for science and engineering. Just thinking about it makes me so excited for the future.

In honor of snate launching, I made my own mini-snate in Fusion that works with a C11-0 Estes rocket motor. It was the last motor I had after a semester a rocket launches, and unfortunately ended up being a dud, but I think the model still looked pretty cute on the launch pad at Rocket Field(my nickname for the field at which I launch rockets):