In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

48  H I G H - S P E E D D R E A M S In the United States, SST enthusiasm had emanated largely from the airframe manufacturers, which had instituted small SST study programs following the U.S. Air Force’s decision to reorient the WS110A program toward a supersonic cruise aircraft. These efforts were confined to aerodynamic and materials research, and involved fewer than fifty engineers at each of the five interested companies. Much of this effort went toward preparing the briefings on SST feasibility that the Air Force had requested via SR-169, and was funded by the companies themselves, not by the government. The results of the SR-169 studies had not been particularly encouraging. But the manufacturers’ obvious interest in a supersonic transport had ramifications for NASA and for the Federal Aviation Agency.1 At NASA’s Langley Research Center, manufacturers’ interest caused the lab to begin researching supersonic configurations that might be more efficient than the XB-70, and would thus improve the SST economic situation. Further, the U.S. manufacturers ’ interest in an SST caused Great Britain to submit a request to the International Civil Aviation Organization for a study of potential SST impact on international aviation, convincing the American Federal Aviation Agency’s head, Elwood Quesada, that Britain intended to produce an SST. In turn, the FAA established a small SST study group. This group’s early effort focused on getting informed about the SST issue. The FAA was a new agency, founded the same year NASA had been (1958), and it did not have the technical knowledge to evaluate the SST claims that circulated through the aviation press and the industry technical conferences. Thus for the first couple of years of supersonic 2 TECHNOLOGICAL RIVALRY AND THE COLD WAR enthusiasm, the FAA was attempting to catch up on the state of the art while NASA researchers were trying to improve it. The 1958 transition from the NACA to NASA had left the Langley Research Center’s aeronautical enthusiasts with a severe problem. The NACA had been exclusively devoted to aeronautics and had taken up space-related research only insofar as necessary to provide support to military space programs. Most of this support concerned hypersonic and re-entry aerodynamics, which were, of course, extensions of the agency’s aerodynamic specialty. More importantly , the NACA had been barred from developmental work. The agency routinely provided data to other agencies and companies in support of their developmental projects, but it did not design or develop airplanes. It did the “research” part of the “research and development” activity exclusively. NASA, however, was assigned the mission of researching and developing rockets and other space hardware. Development was by far the more expensive part of R&D, and the publicity surrounding the space race ensured that the agency’s rocketry efforts would be high-profile, high-priority projects. The aeronautical specialists at Langley rightly believed that aeronautics would be subordinated to the space mission and starved of the resources to carry on new research by the space agency. There was already ample evidence that this would happen. An internal review of the lab’s research effort found that research devoted to fighters, bombers, and transports declined from 71 percent of the lab’s work to 30 percent during fiscal year 1959, while research on rockets, missiles, and spacecraft exploded from 8.8 to 44 percent.2 These fears were reinforced by Langley director Floyd Thompson’s decision to allow the new Space Task Group to take engineers from the rest of the lab at will, and perhaps more importantly, by the Lewis Research Center’s decision to essentially abandon air-breathing propulsion research to better pursue rocketry.3 In short, the Langley lab’s aeronautics specialists faced the problem of remaining relevant in an agency whose obvious future was going to be much different from its past. They were fortunate that two new major aeronautics efforts coincided with the foundation of NASA: the supersonic transport research and a military fighter program that became known as TFX, for Tactical Fighter, Experimental. Both of these efforts substantially contributed to U.S. supersonic technologies and the eventual SST development program while permitting the Langley and Ames laboratory aeronautical specialists to participate in aeronautical projects that they believed were important to T E C H N O L O G I C A L R I V A L R Y A N D T H E...

Share