‘At NACA,’ the instructor said, ‘there are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.’
And then as the two men stood in the throat of the tunnel, where the walls narrowed like the digesting portion of a python, Crampton placed his hand upon the chrome-steel pylon and said, ‘You must treat Langley with reverence. It’s a holy place, really, because without it we couldn’t have proved that engine nacelles should be fused into the wing of the plane rather than stand exposed so that mechanics could service them more easily. We gave the plane forty additional miles an hour with that one. It was at Langley that we proved wheels drawn back into the fuselage after takeoff added another sixty miles. And it was here that we improved the bombers that subdued Hitler.
‘The tunnel must be protected. And if you ever bring in a model with a loose bolt or a fragment of metal that might break off, you can destroy this tunnel.’
From his pocket he took a coin and placed it against the pylon. ‘Let’s imagine that you, Engineer Mott, have brought in a model which is defective. This little piece of metal is going to break loose. Now follow me,’ and he walked swiftly down the darkened tunnel to the first set of twenty-five blades. ‘We’re traveling at six hundred miles an hour and we smash into these wooden blades. We shatter three, and their rubbish flies through here to strike the twenty-six blades, and the whole tunnel is rendered useless.’
Mott studied where two blades in the first set had been adroitly repaired, as if a jeweler had inserted small pieces of wood to fill the holes caused by some break-away piece of metal. ‘Now you understand why we use wooden blades? If we used steel, which would in many ways be better, when a flyaway bolt struck them, their pieces would become bullets.’
Crampton touched the gigantic blades as a father might touch a son who had done well in games. ‘When you work here, Mott, you work in a cathedral.’
It was a year before Mott got into the tunnel, for he was so good at designing models that Crampton kept him in that part of the operation. ‘You’re a real engineer, one of the best. You know materials and how to handle them. If I’d had you as my model builder fifteen years ago …’
‘I’d like to start work in the tunnel.’
‘And you should. I’ve been selfish, keeping you over here in the shops. But you’ll be a better tunnel man for it.’
When he moved into the tunnel, one of seventeen creative engineers supported by twenty-three highly skilled model builders and mathematicians, he launched a series of experiments to identify the sometimes minute modifications that pinpointed improvements to be made in the full-scale prototypes of the aircraft before they were sent up the Chesapeake Bay for testing at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River. He found his work totally absorbing, for it utilized all that he had learned at Georgia, Louisiana and New Mexico.
His life with his family, ensconced in a small white bungalow on the banks of the James River, with a small boat of their own, was the happiest he had ever known. His elder son, Millard, having been expelled from an exclusive school in New England, was idling his way through an ineffectual public school education, but he was behaving himself, and Christopher reveled in the waterfront, competing with other youngsters in one-man small-boat races. Rachel, indefatigably concerned about the problems of her society, had no Germans to teach English, so she directed her enthusiasm to black playgrounds around Hampton, where she served as a voluntary teacher’s helper, taking over whole areas when regular supervisors called in sick.
The Motts, as a group, had found their niche, and even Rachel’s mother, when she visited NACA, had to agree that her son-in-law had finally landed a job commensurate with his qualifications, but she did feel obliged to offer two criticisms: ‘They’re not paying you nearly enough, Stanley. And I hope that when you have a good hold on things here, you’ll apply to MIT for a teaching position.’ She could not believe that any really first-class intellect ever spent the productive years of his life at any place other than Harvard or MIT. Second-class men did rather nicely at Princeton or Yale, and for the others, there were the Western colleges that excelled at basketball.
Stanley and Rachel were amused by her mother’s pretensions, and Stanley tried to explain that NACA was closely associated with the very Harvard and MIT professors whom she admired. ‘Experts from those schools often spend weeks with us at NACA working on problems too abstruse for the university men to solve. In fact, last week I was working with two professors from MIT on the problem of how to bring a body traveling twenty-five thousand miles an hour in empty outer space back through the friction of the heavy atmosphere without permitting it to burn up from the tremendous temperatures generated.’
Mott had told the professors, ‘If we ever send men into space, as Von Braun insists we will, the problem will not be getting them up into space. The Huntsville Germans are sure they can do that with rockets they already have. The difficulty will be getting them safely down. Through the atmosphere. At temperatures which cause ordinary metal to burn like paper.’
The three men studied this in abstract for three weeks, then conducted what experiments they could in the wind tunnel, but since it was obvious that they could never generate speeds of 25,000 miles an hour, they were again thrown back into speculation. They spent another six weeks drafting a report on the current status of bringing a metal body back through the atmosphere, and in the end made a one-paragraph recommendation:
At the present state-of-the-art we do not know enough to make even tentative suggestions as to how this intricate problem should be solved, but we do know that our ignorance of the atmosphere above 65,000 feet will be a permanent disability unless immediately resolved. We recommend an intensive study of the atmosphere to a height of 200,000 feet and higher if present equipment permits.
This advice was so obviously sensible that when the MIT professors departed, the engineers in charge of NACA looked about for one of their men to head the study of the upper atmosphere, and because of Mott’s excellent work in the wind tunnels, they gave him the job, and for the next two years he spent about half his time at nearby Wallops Island.
This was one of the low, marshy barrier islands of the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula, contiguous to Chincoteague, where the wild ponies thrived. It was a forbidding place, smothered in mosquitoes and buried in swamps, but its splendid beaches, curving like majestic scimitars, provided launching spots from which scientific instruments could be thrown high into the air by small, powerful rockets using solid fuels.
There were in these early days no commodious quarters for visitors, so that when one flew the relatively short distance from NACA installations at Langley to the frontier area at Wallops, one traveled from long-established order to disorder, from comfort to discomfort. However, the life on Wallops was so primitive, with great fishing and boar hunting and living in tents, and improvised meals heavy with carbohydrates, that most men enjoyed it: ‘This is the Daniel Boone part of my life. My wife and kids sure as hell can’t follow me here.’
At Wallops, America’s fundamental research into the upper atmosphere took place, and the secret of the excellent results obtained—best in the world—was twofold: rockets and telemetry. The former carried sophisticated scientific instruments thirty and forty miles into the air; the latter reported what happened en route … up and down.
A specialist in telemetry explained his arcane art: ‘Simplest way to get data, of course, would be to have the nose cone or payload of the rocket containing the instruments parachute back to earth so we could visually check them. Two problems: our rockets must fire out to sea to prevent land disasters; and the complexity and weight of the parachute system would negate the value of the shot. So we go two different routes.’
He took Mott to the radar range, where delicate instruments monitored every moment of a rocket flight so that speed, acceleration and atmospheric resistance could be determined. ‘Look at the graphs the radar produces. They tell us everything.’ The expert laughed. ‘Everything, that is, excep
t what we really want to know. So we fall back upon this final system.’ And he showed Mott how the instruments sent aloft delivered electrical impulses to a kind of radio which relayed them back to Earth. ‘When we send this baby up, it can talk to us in code and report every slight change it encounters. We call it telemetry.’
Occasionally the instruments didn’t work. A most intricate device would be placed atop a sounding rocket, complete with a score of telemetric devices, and it would soar the first five miles through the visible cloud layer, through the stratosphere and mesosphere, reporting perfectly on conditions there, but when it entered the ionosphere, where the data became critical, some small component of the instrument system, damaged by the physical stress of launch, would cease functioning and the shot would be scrubbed.
These failures irritated Mott, for he knew that he was on the verge of understanding the atmosphere, that mysterious ocean of air which seemed so evanescent on a summer’s day but which was almost as solid as an oaken board when one wanted to penetrate it at one’s own speed. He studied the best reports available, especially those of the Russians, who had done such good work, and he constructed the most beautiful diagrams of the atmosphere, using eleven different colors to indicate the bands which appeared to differentiate the varied characteristics of this great, unknown ocean.
He was captivated by two physical features that did not seem, at first glance, to be in any way associated with NACA’s desire to bring a metal vehicle back through the atmosphere: the matter of temperature at various altitudes, and the spectacular manner in which pressure diminished as one rose higher and higher. He was not obligated to study these phenomena, but he was drawn to do so on the off chance that they might shed light on his basic problem.
He had always supposed, from his experience in climbing mountains and from what normal airplane flight proved, that the higher one went into the air, the colder one became, and his tests at Wallops confirmed this. At one mile up, it was cold. At two miles, it was noticeably colder. At nearly three miles in the Rockies, it was bitter. And on an airplane seven miles up, it dropped to −50°.
It continued this way to an altitude of about twelve miles, and then things went haywire, as if an entire new set of rules applied, for at sixteen miles, the temperature started to rise sharply until, at thirty miles, it was a comfortable +48°. But this soon changed, for at fifty miles, it dropped to a severe −110°, where it remained for some time.
But at about fifty-five miles, it started a dramatic leaping as if fire had been placed under the instruments; it reached more than +200°. And then at some point beyond which the Wallops machines could not yet soar, an almost unbelievable phenomenon would occur: the temperature of the atmosphere would be the same on all sides of the machine, but the side facing the Sun would accumulate so much radiation that it would heat beyond the boiling point, while the shadow side, only a few feet distant, would be −200°.
It was a crazy ambience, this vertical pillar of atmosphere, but it was the portion of the universe through which man must move if he wished ever to enter space, and its peculiar behavior was dictated by physical laws that could be unraveled if men like Mott had sufficient brains and enough rockets at Wallops Island to accumulate the data. There were, of course, other groups in various parts of the United States, as dedicated as he, working on similar problems related to space: How to build better rocket engines? How to combine more efficient fuels? How to navigate when there are no landmarks to refer to? How to construct suits in which men could live in a world of no pressure?
It was the latter concern which kept Mott focused on the problem of decreasing pressure as one rose through the atmosphere. At sea level it had been agreed that pressure was normal, 100 percent, but it diminished quickly as one climbed upward, until at the top of the Rockies it was only 50 percent of normal, and at five miles, it was so weakened that men required additional oxygen to breathe. If air pressure at sea level was judged to be 1, at sixty miles up, it became 0.000002, and so far as human breathing was concerned, oxygen and pressure both could be said to have vanished.
Mott spent several months analyzing this phenomenon and interpreting what it would mean to either a man or a machine, and he helped deduce the principles which would govern any flight into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. In doing so, he became so enchanted with this mysterious ocean of air that he would often stand on the beach at Wallops, not far from the primordial soup from which life had emerged three or four billion years ago, and watch with awe as one of his weather rockets soared into the air, bearing its precious little cargo of instruments which would send down arcane signals as to what was occurring aloft, and as it passed gradually from sight he would remain on the silent beach, imagining himself a passenger aboard that rocket, passing from cold to hot to burning hot and freezing cold, breathing normally in the first seconds, then feeling his throat constrict as oxygen became more rare, then gasping for one final breath of air that did not exist, before turning on the latest device of his imagination which would provide him with oxygen and proper pressure.
Like all such experimenters in these years, whether in the backwaters of America or the remote corners of Soviet Russia, Mott lived in a world of juvenile excitement, moving from one threshold to another like a boy with a chemistry set or a new collection of maps, always wondering, speculating, making wild guesses, and striving to thrust back a little further the frontiers of knowledge. One evening, as he watched the Sun already sunk throw its rays around the edge of the western earth to illuminate one of his radiosondes rising into the highest layers of the atmosphere, a hundred miles up, making it shine while Earth grew increasingly dark, he realized that with imperceptible steps he was making the transition from engineer to scientist, for with the skills of the former he was attacking the mysteries which preoccupied the latter, and he was increasingly proud to stand in both camps, a man who could at the same time control material things like metals and wind tunnels yet grapple with the ultimate mysteries such as life at incredible altitudes. His four published papers indicated the direction in which his mind was growing:
Mott, Stanley and Crampton, Harry: Effects on the Base, Afterbody and Tail Regions of Twin-Engine Airplane Model with Extra Low Horizontal Tail Locations at a Speed of Mach 0.7. 1955.
Mott, Stanley and Winslow, Elmer: Aerodynamic Characteristics of a Delta Wing with a 75° Swept Leading Edge at Mach 2.36 to Mach 3.08. 1955.
Mott, Stanley: Preliminary Tables for Estimating the Properties of the Upper Atmosphere as Derived from Telemetry Delivered by Rockets and Free Balloons. 1956.
Mott, Stanley: Probable Structure of the Atmosphere at Heights beyond 350,000 Feet. 1956.
As his work at Wallops drew to a conclusion, it was generally recognized by his associates that he knew as much about the upper atmosphere as any man alive, and they suspected that this mastery would serve as a plateau from which he would ascend to even greater understandings, not because of his undoubted ability but because the speed of change was so great that anyone who stood upon an eminence in these particular years would be thrown inescapably higher.
As often happened with men obsessed by abstract ideas, Stanley’s mastery came at the expense of his family life. Because of his increasingly protracted absences from Langley, Rachel had to assume responsibility for the boys, and she witnessed daily how much Millard and Christopher needed their father. The older boy had become moody and insecure; the younger, assertive and rather difficult to handle. Judging that only a little fatherly care could bring the younger son, Chris, back into orbit, she directed most of her attention to Millard, now thirteen, and the more she saw of him the more disturbed she became, for he was definitely developing characteristics which, if projected ten years, would make him most unmanly.
The children of top-flight engineers and scientists, such as those one saw at NACA laboratories, were apt to be highly individualistic, and this did not disturb Rachel, but she did believe that boys should develop as boys and girls as girls
, and it distressed her to see anyone confused about his or her status. Millard was definitely confused and she wanted her husband to do something about it.
As soon as the problem was presented to Stanley, in whispers upon his return from Wallops, he acknowledged that he must act quickly, and he suggested a camping trip to the undeveloped marshes east of Chincoteague, and the family responded enthusiastically. They borrowed a small truck from a NACA engineer, put together some informal camping equipment, including a Coleman stove, and were off, taking the ferry from Norfolk across the mouth of the Chesapeake to Cape Charles and then up the peninsula to an area as wild and forlorn as any in America, but also as powerful because of its relationship to the sea.
There they camped, netting themselves off at night from the ferocious mosquitoes and probing Assateague Island during the day for signs of feral pigs and strange birds. Young Christopher lost his boisterousness the first day and settled down to enjoyable explorations with his father: ‘Look at the herons. Four kinds and the book shows only three.’ With a heavy pencil he checked off each of the birds he saw, more than fifty, giving himself credit for some that not even Rachel could identify as they sped past.
Space: A Novel Page 27