High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945–1999

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N  1 This book is a history of American attempts to design and build a “supersonic transport,” or SST, an airliner capable of flying faster than the speed of sound. Technologically, SSTs have been possible since the late 1950s, and the United States government has tried three times to foster one. In 1963, the Kennedy administration approved a program to design and build two prototype SSTs, with the expectation that aircraft companies would then manufacture large numbers of them. After cancellation of this “national SST” program in 1971, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded a much smaller research program into advanced SST technologies , the Supersonic Cruise Aircraft Research program (SCAR), hoping that the resulting technological advancements would make a production SST possible during the 1980s. This too was cancelled, in 1981. In 1989, however, NASA was able to win approval of a third SST research program, this time named “High Speed Research,” or HSR. The HSR program’s goal was to produce the technologies necessary for an environmentally acceptable, economically viable “High Speed Civil Transport,” a new euphemism for an SST. The High Speed Research program was cancelled in 1998, still many years short of a production HSCT. This is therefore a history of three programs that did not result in aircraft. While SSTs do exist, in the form of the Anglo-French Concorde and Russian TU-144, both of these 1960s-era aircraft were commercial failures and now survive as museum displays. And they are not American aircraft in any case. The long SST saga reveals how national politics and business interests interact in the realm of high technology. All three American SST programs were rooted in national and international politics, products of state-sponsored INTRODUCTION drives to achieve and sustain dominance in the commercial aircraft industry and in its vital subcontracting industries. All three collapsed when their political alliances disintegrated. In the two largest programs, a lack of corporate interest in actually manufacturing an aircraft played a major role in unraveling the programs’ political backing. Corporate executives found the technical risk too high, and the economic return too improbable, to invest the billions of dollars necessary to put an SST in production. Hence one focus of this book is the politics of the aircraft business. The other major focus is on environmental politics; more specifically, the impact of environmentalism on NASA, aircraft technologies, and SST economics . “New environmentalists” led a political battle against the first U.S. SST program that succeeded in killing the program in 1971. But they accomplished far more than the demise of a noisy, polluting, and uneconomical airplane. They produced a corporate demand that the government finance the technologies necessary for environmental mitigation, and NASA became the vehicle for this effort. In short, the collision between dreams of speed and hopes of a healthier environment forced engineers to transform aircraft technologies. PROGRESS AND SUPERSONICS Writer John Newhouse has referred to the commercial aircraft trade as a “sporty game.”1 When he wrote in 1982, there were four manufacturers of large commercial airliners in the world, not including Soviet builders; since then, that total has been reduced to two: the Boeing Company and Airbus Industrie. The business Newhouse described is very high risk. A new airplane requires many billions of dollars to design, build, test, and certify. Only large companies, or companies backed by government financing, could enter the commercial jet airliner business, and most of the companies that have tried have failed. The point at which companies “break even” and begin to see a return on a new aircraft is seven to ten years, if the company survives that long. The airliner market is small compared to other industrial products, such as automobiles, and a design’s rejection by only a handful of major airlines can destroy the design’s market and bankrupt the builder. The industry is also subject to an unusually intense business cycle whose period is generally shorter than the investment horizon for new aircraft. The industry has never 2  H I G H - S P E E D D R E A M S developed business plans or manufacturing processes that permit relatively painless accommodation to the cycle’s variations, and both downturns and upswings have tended to impose very high costs on the manufacturers. Finally, contrary to conventional financial expectations, the high risk is...