Posted on 03/06/2012 6:57:53 PM PST by U-238
During a recent trip to Yuma Proving Ground, in Arizona, I passed a unique looking artillery piece in a remote area of the installation. It has an extremely long barrel and appeared to be anchored in a concrete abutment. Having more than a passing interest in ordnance I made some inquiries as to origins and purpose of the gun.
What I had stumbled across, on that hot desert day, was one of three unique guns that had been part of a very ambitious undertaking called the “High Altitude Research Project,” or HARP. The brainchild of Jerry Bull (of “Iranian Super Gun” fame), HARP was an innovative approach to putting satellites in space. HARP started out as a joint project between the Canadian Armaments and Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) and the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory and Aberdeen Proving Ground to study the upper atmosphere. It later evolved into a project to economically place satellites into orbit, as well as the basis of improved and extended range artillery.
HARP consisted of two 16-inch naval guns — one welded atop of the other with reinforcing cables and stiffening bars running the length of both barrels. The barrels were affixed to a breach anchored into a heavy concrete and steel ground-mount capable of withstanding the detonation of nearly 1,000 pounds of propellant. From a firing point located in Barbados, the HARP could send a projectile, called a Martlet, to an altitude of 180 kilometers, a record that stands today. Had it not been for political infighting and inter-service rivalries, Bull would have, undoubtedly, been successful in developing a cannon-launched satellite delivery system. Fortunately, good ideas tend to stand the test of time.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationaldefensemagazine.org ...
Yes. The charge was illegal arms dealing to South Africa. Six months in prison.
A giant slingshot could work too. /s
“Base-bleed” ammunition. I remember reading about that with Israeli and South African artillery.
That's true, but the Germans also found that energizing such a gun required a huge city-scale power station and was therefore technologically unfeasible. The captured project files were sent to the Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground after the war where Navy scientists looked at the concept again in the late 1940s but confirmed the German's findings. After HARP, the ballistics scientists at Dahlgren once again reviewed electric guns in the mid-1970s but again found that the technology was not there yet.
100% sure, as far as Bull's Navy projects went. In the early 1970s, he bombarded (no pun intended) the Navy with unsolicited proposals for his gun-launched satellites, and because he had a few congressional connections, the admirals humored him. During the tests at Dahlgren, the electronics in the projectiles failed most of the time due to spikes of up to 70 G's during firing. The Navy, which was developing Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles at the time, politely declined to pursue Bull's concept. He got mad and actually sued the Navy, but ended up losing. So he was pissed off at Uncle Sam well before Carter and the State Department screwed him.
It all discussed in this book:
The Sound of Freedom: Naval Weapons Technology at Dahlgren, Virginia, 1918-2006
I can't speak about the electronics of today, but the electronics of a guided-projectile are probably far more robust than those of an actual satellite, which the author of this piece is arguing for.
No, the Navy didn't invest in it because it didn't work. And there's an enormous difference between satellites (often weighing tons) and guided projectiles (weighing only a few pounds). The physics just do not work.
That is my read on it as well. I also believe that NASA was gunning for him because they thought that gun launched satellites were a threat to their rocket program.
The way Bull was treated was one of the most disgusting abuses of power that I found in my career. Bull was a certifiable genius. He used his genius to further the technological and military advancement of the United States, and was betrayed for that effort.
You do not need to shoot complex communications satellites into orbit with a gun to save very large amounts of money and gain very significant capabilities by sending things to orbit with gun launched projectiles.
Just the ability to send water, fuel, building materials and food into orbit at a tiny fraction of the cost per pound of rocket delivered materials would be a game changing advantage.
A much longer rail gun would have much lower G-forces. Possibly a 100 mile long horizontal rail gun could do the job. Electricity is cheap and highly controllable.
I mainly blame the elite snotty liberals in the State Dept for screwing him, instead of “failing to notice” the CIA’s wink/nod acceptance of his overseas military work with the RSA.
To the libs at State, working with the RSA was a mortal sin, despite the Cold War battles raging in southern Africa.
Bull should have been given great respect and a high-paying position in the USA all of his life, to keep his amazing brain power working for us, instead of forcing him to grub around the world for a paycheck.
Typical short-sightedness by Uncle Sap.
And this is feasible for shooting stuff into orbit, how?
These people: http://www.punkinchunkin.com/ address a similar problem. A significant goal is to not turn the projectile into sauce upon launch.
Because 1) the Earth curves away, and 2) to orbit, an object needs to be moving fairly horizontal to the Earth's surface. Sending an unpowered object mostly straight up will result in it coming right back down.
Thanks for the additional information. I did not know that
:)
Wasn’t this looked at years (decades?) ago? They quickly realized the atmosphere is much too dense to shoot a satellite into orbit from land near sea level. But even at 16,000 feet altitude on the equator in the Andes Mountains, there was still no way to do it. Too much friction passing through the atmosphere, which fouled the necessarily precise trajectory, the blast required to gain orbit would be too much for a satellite to absorb and still be a functioning, piece of hardware, etc.
That’s about what I remember reading. Anyway, it’s not being done, so that pretty much means it’s not feasible.
Maybe Russia and China have this technology already. After Gearld Bull’s death and the folding of SRC those scientists and engineers had to go somwhere.They also had affiliated companies that included SRCQ (SRC Quebec), SRCI, Paragon, PRB (Belgian corporation), and SRCB (SRC Belgium).
The other thing was the projectile had to be fired not up in the air at a steep angle but on much more of a flat trajectory, though slightly elevated, so that it would end up circling the earth like a satellite would. This flat trajectory only magnified the problems getting through the atmosphere and made the required blast a lot more bigger.
Good Point. You may be right,
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