Maximum Elevation

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

Maximum Elevation -- Fire!

by Alan Burnham

Anybody interested in what's going on in the world soon gets snowed under with a mass of information. Most of it just flows by but some of it sticks, according to what interests the individual. Anything in the news about railroads tends to get filed away somewhere in the
disorganised shambles of my mind, not because I ever had a fanatical interest in trains but because I worked on them for a long time.

Which is why I'm aware that the Chinese government has just begun operating a railroad between Golmund and Lhasa, the city which used to be the capital of the independent country of Tibet. Apparently the railroad cost over three billion dollars to build. That's a lot of money and resources for a country like China to expend in such a remote area when it's struggling to improve its infrastructure nation wide. But no doubt the Chinese leadership have their reasons. Many of them.

Yet I can't help wondering if one of those reasons might have something to do with a technology which has, in turn, been enthusiastically supported by Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and a world renowned mad scientist.

Well, that's a bit of a beat up. He wasn't really a mad scientist, he was just a very pissed off scientist most of the time.

In 1865 Jules Verne published a science fiction novel, "From the Earth to the Moon", in which his intrepid astronauts travel into space inside a giant shell fired from a giant cannon. Nice plot line but the acceleration forces would have instantly pureed the passengers.

March 1918, and a huge piece of artillery named in honour of the German Kaiser, the Wilhelm Geschuetz, is used to bombard Paris. The gun has a range of 130 kilometres and the shells take a minute and a half to reach the highest point of their trajectory, 40 kilometres above the earth. Which is about three time higher than commercial airliners fly today. Not bad for 1918.

1926, and some German scientists amuse themselves by designing a gun they believe could actually fire a shell to the moon. A barrel length of 900 metres long is envisaged. The designers suggest building the gun with angled lateral chambers. These would have additional propellant charges that would be set off electrically as the shell passed by, continually boosting up the pressure in the gun barrel behind the projectile.

1944, and Germany is preparing to launch a series of Vergeltungswaffen (retaliation weapons) against England. The V1 is the world's first cruise missile, the V2 is the world's first long range rocket, and the V3's are a battery of super guns being built under concrete domes at Mimoyecques in France. The V3's have the angled additional propellent chambers first thought of in 1929 . The super gun batteries are designed to rain down 600 tonnes of explosive every day on London, 165 kilometres away. It didn't happen though. The Germans had a lot of problems designing shells which would stay stable at a speed of one and a half kilometres per second and by the time the design was sorted out RAF bunker buster bombs had penetrated the protective domes and turned the V3's into scrap metal.

The sort of man the Germans had needed was somebody like Doctor Gerald Bull. He was the most brilliant artillery scientist of the twentieth century. Born in Ontario in 1928, he became head of the Aerophysics department of the Canadian Armed Forces at the age of 31. But Bull was a driven man in his ambitions and neither the attitudes nor the funding of the Canadian military suited him. Bull's goal was to build a cannon big enough to fire projectiles into space.

In 1961 he became head of project HARP (High Altitude Research Project). It was ostensibly a research program run by McGill University of Montreal but received a lot of under the counter
funding from the Pentagon. HARP was established on the island of Barbados, down range from Cape Kennedy. Bull set up an old battleship gun, extended it out to a barrel length of 36 metres and developed new shells and propellents for it. By 1967 he was firing 85 kilo projectiles to a height of 180 kilometres. Which meant the shells were travelling at about half the speed needed to reach low earth orbit. The project had cost $10 million, chicken feed even by sixties standards.

Then the Canadians pulled the plug on HARP. The Vietnam war was raging and they wanted nothing to do with the US military. Or with Doctor Bull and his outspoken views on Canadian bureaucracy. And what value did the US place on Bull? He became the third man in history to be made an American citizen by act of Congress. The other two were Winston Churchill and Marquis de Lafayette.

But then Gerald Bull hit trouble: big trouble. The CIA encouraged him to design some highly effective artillery for South Africa, which was still being run by the apartheid regime. Bull succeeded brilliantly, but Jimmy Carter was elected, South Africa was no longer flavour of the month and Bull got six months in jail for illegal arms dealing.

Angry and embittered, Bull did his time and then became an artillery consultant for many different countries, including China and Iraq. And with Saddam Hussein he hit pay dirt. A contract to build the super cannon of his dreams. At which point I should make it clear there was never any intention of using the so called Babylon gun for military purposes. A gun which only fires in one direction and can be knocked out by air strikes is not a viable weapon, as the V3 project proved.

The promise Bull made which grabbed Saddam's interest was to fire rocket assisted 2,000 kilo shells from the supergun which could each deliver 200 kilos to orbit at $600 per kilo. The current cost of a kilo into orbit is around $25,000. Saddam could have put hundreds of Arab satellites up at Bull's price. Small satellites, but even minor space satellites can carry out useful surveillance and signals interception work.

Would the satellites' electronics have stood the acceleration forces involved? Sure, the American Army has 155mm shells which incorporate laser guidance units. In 1944 my mother was firing high velocity anti-aircraft shells fitted with proximity fuses and they had built in radio ranging circuits using glass tubes!

No, the problem Doctor Bull had with the Saddam deal was that apart from building the cannon he was expected to help the Iraqis redesign their Scud missiles. Which probably accounts for the fact that when Bull answered the door of his Brussels apartment in 1990 he was shot five times in the head with a silenced pistol. The Babylon gun died with him. But other researchers are still fascinated with concept of the supergun and shell/rocket combo.

The latest idea is to use the lateral injectors to blast ultra hot hydrogen gas into the gun barrel behind the moving projectile. In fact there are a whole lot of developing technologies which could make the idea work better than ever. But the simplest idea of all is that if a space cannon is ever built, the best place to put it is on the highest possible site. At a height of 5 kilometres the atmosphere is so much thinner that the energy required to reach orbit is cut by a third.

As I mentioned before, Gerald Bull did a lot of research work for the Chinese as well as the Iraqis. The Chinese military unveiled a newly built 21 metre supergun in 1995. And the Chinese now have access to a railroad which is over 5 kilometres high at its maximum elevation.

I'm not saying the Chinese built the Tibetan railroad so they could build an orbital cannon. What I am saying is that, if they ever wanted to, they're now in an excellent position to remind the world exactly who it was who invented gunpowder in the first place.

But would anybody want to build a space gun?

The short answer is no, not unless you could be reasonably sure that it could shoot large amounts of food, fuel, water, oxygen, tools and building materials into orbit, and do so cheaply and reliably. But granted that assumption a work crew based on an orbiting platform could then use the cannon launched deliveries to build and fuel spacecraft capable of transhipping supplies out to lunar orbit. Spacecraft to operate outside the atmosphere, remember. You can build the hull of a ion-engined, cargo-carrying vacuum-faring spaceship out of plastic milk crates and bailing wire.

Why go to the moon? Because the only way of generating unlimited supplies of nuclear energy without producing radioactive waste is by developing nuclear fusion reactors. The ideal fuel for nuclear fusion is helium-3. And there's no helium-3 on earth. But there is on the moon. For the nations that can get there and bring it back.

Hit Counter