Tue, 02 Mar 2004
USAF atomic-powered bomber designs of the 1950's
Of course, not all the Strangelove-era hardware developed by
the United States military can be laid at the door of barking
mad German rocket scientists; some of the technologies were
100% home-grown, like this one, the atomic-powered bomber.
Did I say mad? Look at it this way: imagine you are J. Random
1950's-era Planetary Superpower, and you wish to be able to
drop very large bombs anywhere on the planet. ICBMs are not
yet accurate enough or sufficiently available, so you decide to
use bombers. Which is a more sensible approach to dealing with
your bomber fleet's limited strike radius: work on improving
the fuel efficiency of turbojets and build a fleet of tankers
for in-flight refueling, or gamble on a difficult, high-tech
fix by trying to build nuclear powered
bombers?
From 1948 until 1962, the US Department of Defense pumped
a couple of billion dollars into trying to build a
nuclear-powered bomber. They got as far as static-testing an
HTRE-3 air-cycle reactor and flying the ASTR test reactor in
the rear bomb bay of a heavily modified B-36 bomber, the
NB-36H.
As with so much else, there's a wealth of information about
this stuff on the web. You can find a history of the
project, and monographs on the
US Navy's attempts to build a nuclear-powered flying boat;
even the 1950
NACA reports on the feasibility of three cycles
for the nuclear propulsion of aircraft.
In the end, the advent of the ICBM (not to mention in-flight
refueling) killed off the atomic-powered bomber -- but the
technologies lived on for a while, in the shape of the Vought
SLAM, aka
Project Pluto (even
more information here), the
atomic-powered cruise missile.
I swear I'm not making any of this up.
[Discuss
dieselpunk]
posted at: 12:25 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry
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