starship-design: A Leader Out Of Time Speaks:

["L. Clayton Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

A Leader Out Of Time Speaks:
The Legacy Of J. B. Medaris
by Publius Rex
Los Angeles - Aug 20, 2003

In my previous article, I asked the important question, "Is The Air Force
The Enemy Of Space?"

Now, having answered that question in the affirmative, I will go on to talk
about a man who was, in my opinion, the real father of Apollo, and of Zeus
as well (as in Nike-Zeus).

Most of what can be known about General Medaris can be found in a book I
will quote from frequently here - a book whose Epilogue was written exactly
43 years ago this month.

This book is none other than Countdown For Decision.

Like Korolov and other Chief Soviet Designers, General Medaris was forced to
use tricks on occasion in order to, quite literally, lay the foundation for
future projects:

"One of the prime necessities is a test tower on which a big missile can be
mounted and held down for thorough static testing...The Army had no mission
beyond the Redstone...Yet if anything significant were to be done in the
future, the construction of such a complex would have to start right away."

He had no choice but to use production money:

"Finally, we cooked up a plausible story of needing the test tower and other
test facilities in order to carry on the required quality control and
inspection testing that would be needed when the Redstone missile went into
production...It is interesting to note that had not this project been rammed
through and approved when it was not really justified by either ground rules
or the needs of the moment, there would have been nothing available to make
possible the rapid development of the Jupiter missile or the test work that
made the satellites possible." (Page 63-64, Countdown For Decision).

What was to be the Saturn IB was tested here.

Even with this hand won, the General was only playing catch-up with the huge
R-7. The General lamented our lack of large, liquid-fueled rockets, while
giving due credit to the Soviets:

"They (the Russians) began with no fear of size, as such, and were quite
willing to build big missiles...Thus was laid the foundation for adequate
capability in large, powerful motors. The development of smaller, lighter
atomic warheads permitted the exploitation of these big motors in terms of
added range...and heavier weight carrying abilities in space-work. This in
turn permitted faster progress since a margin of power was available to
cover minor error. We have never had this margin for error, and we still
don't." (Page 45, Countdown For Decision.)

These words are true even today, as Boeing's SeaLaunch (Zenit) and
Lockheed's Atlas V launch comsats with Soviet space shuttle strap-on engines
like the RD-170 and the RD-180, respectively.

The need of heavy-lift is a running theme in the General's book, Countdown
For Decision. On page 202, he tells us that he could not put "any guidance
above the Redstone's first stage." This was "one of the penalties we were
paying for not having a big enough booster." On page 229, the second
satellite launch is described as a failure, the cause of which could not be
determined because they could not put enough instruments aboard - "one of
the worst penalties of not having big boosters to work with."

Later in the book (page 242) Medaris talks about Dr. Abe Silverstein who had
been deputy director of the NACA laboratory in Cleveland, who was later
appointed to head Space Operations for NASA;

"Few people know, as we did, that only a few months before Sputnik, Dr.
Silverstein had been chairman of a committee appointed by the Secretary Of
Defense to determine future requirements for large rocket engines. After
considerable deliberation, the committee came out, over Dr. Silverstein's
signature, with the pontifical declaration that 'there appears to be no
foreseeable need for any rocket engines of thrust greater than that now
being developed for ICBM'."

This thinking has hardly changed and any consideration for heavy-lift
development has now been put off with the OSP and other programs usurping
funds.

The General sums up his thoughts on heavy-lift saying that many launch
vehicle failures can "be charged directly to the fact that vital equipment
aboard cannot be made sufficiently dependable, or duplicated as it should to
provide dependability because the project is constantly fighting weight."

The Shuttle-derived ALS/NLS heavy-lift launch system was to have dealt with
these issues and given us engine-out capabilities current EELVs still lack.
But we still have many detractors like General Jumper, Dr. Silverstein, Dr.
Herbert York, and others who wanted nothing more than the Titans (p 263). It
got to the point where the General had to give up his team of scientists to
NASA for their adequate funding (p.266).

The General had been fighting the Air Force for quite some time. A document
known as the Wilson Memorandum robbed the Army of missile development and
gave most everything to the Air Force.

While the Air Force had authority for ICBMs like the early Atlas under the
Air Force Ballistic Missile Division (AFBMD), their Thor IRBM was far behind
the Army's Jupiter program.

General Medaris even went so far as to question the wisdom of the separation
of the Air Force from the Army, saying that it was: "fundamentally unwise to
set up a whole new branch of the Armed Forces on the basis of an instrument
(the manned aircraft) rather than a mission to be accomplished."

If, say, Air Force Chief of Staff Jumper thinks there is no call for a
separate Space Force, well then, there were those who could say the same
about the very existence of the Air Force, which came into being at the same
time Congress passed the National Security Act which in 1947, set up the DoD
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (page 54-55).

Nothing has been the same since, and inter-Service rivalry has only
increased.

Sadly, such parochialism may be the only way a true Space Force posture can
be formed and defended.

Only when a Space Force can grow as quickly and as strong as the Air Force's
ascent to power will Space have a chance.

If (as General Jumper would no doubt hold) the Air Force is sufficiently
different from the Army to warrant its own

Branch of the Service, the same must certainly also now be said of a Space
Force.

The hostility towards space is not without precedent.

In talking about the formation of the Air Force, the General admits that he:
sometimes feels that the seeds for all this trouble were sown by the refusal
of old-line Navy and Army officers to accept the manned aircraft as an
effective instrument of war in a period when it actually was a powerful and
effective weapon. This put the proponents of manned aircraft in the position
of martyrdom." and led to the backlash that spawned the Air Force (page 60).

This Air Force "cost the American taxpayer untold millions of dollars in
fighter planes, fighter bases, and detection devices designed to nullify a
threat (Soviet Bombers) that never became a full scale menace." (Page 54).
To this day, the Russians still have no real equivalent to the B-52.

The great expense came from Air Force assuming that the Soviets were also
placing their lot in Air Power, when nothing could be further from the
truth.

Space was, and still is, their business.

General Medaris laid down some of his concerns in his "Dagger Report" and
was embarrassed when a man under him by the name of Nickerson wrote an even
sharper piece called "Considerations On The Wilson Memorandum" that was sent
to Washington reporter Jack Anderson who was then handling Drew Pearson's
column.

This incident almost killed Army rocket development, but later the General
himself had to fight the Air Force even more fervently to get anything done
at all (Page 129).

The General also expressed opinions on the types of people who make the best
civilian leaders. He came to the startling conclusion that lawyers, at home
in red-tape, and used to arguing a point home, were better fighters than
businessmen who, used to having their own way - often look for a way out
when swamped. A lawyer can also "take a leave of absence and his law
partners go right on working for him" where the businessman is hurt when he
switches over to government pay and is expected to dump stock if he is
expected to, say, get a Senate confirmation (pp. 152-153).

The business model has only led to a situation where the number of
"accountants and bookkeepers have been multiplied four-fold, replacing
leaders, strategists, and tacticians, and not one dime of the taxpayers'
money has been saved" (p. 271).

The General tells us that the "root of the evil is this. More and more the
balance shifts from civilian policy control of the military to bureaucratic
dominance and day-to-day operation of the Armed Forces by professional civil
servants" who have their own "personal empires" (p. 270).

What has changed over these past four decades since these words were first
written?

The General wraps up his thoughts on how the Army was given no credit for
its moon-plans (page 298, plans on page 187), and how the Nike-Zeus ABM
system was stymied, even when the similar Nike-Hercules, in defeating a
Corporal, proved "that a bullet can hit a bullet" (p. 301).

In the last chapter of his book, Medaris is concerned with the money spent
on offensive systems at the expense of defensive systems designed to protect
our cities from attack. He even thought Saturn vital, as it could have
eliminated the costly development of the Titan vehicles, which, like the
Saturn V, cost almost a billion dollars a shot with the Titan IV, but with
only 1/5 the payload.

If you recall, the early Saturns were built with Jupiter and Redstone
tankage.

In the very last paragraph, we are left with these words:

"Vital military needs in space...clamor for attention while we overspend on
mass destruction. There is little apparent relationship between our foreign
policy and our military posture, yet the whole military establishment is
primarily the handmaiden of foreign policy and the base of support in the
field of international relations" (page 303).
In short, we have spent too much on a third World-War when what we now face
are many Third-World wars.

The Cold War, and poor decisions, is costing us all, and our space
infrastructure is suffering the most.

To quote a man who left BMDO due to having his own pro-space concerns
ignored - like General Medaris:

"We forgot all about our headache (lack of space funding) when a wrench was
dropped on our foot (9/11)."

The wrench, by-and-large, has been removed.

And we have all been left with a mighty headache.

While DARPA has heady thoughts about hypersonics and other fanciful systems,
those now at BMDO are left with systems less effective than Nike-Zeus. Where
DARPA is pie-in-the-sky, the BMDO heads are bumps on a log.

We must plot a middle course.

We have forgotten what gave us a foothold in space in the first place.

The development of large rockets.

Only when we buckled down and built the Saturns did we begin to have a
launcher as powerful as what the Soviets had all along.

But we forgot our lessons, threw away our capability, and by accepting the
crutch of OSP, we are now on the road to kill the Shuttle - which is the
only vehicle that a true Heavy-lifter can be derived from.

As it stands now, the 39-series pads look to rust to oblivion.

In my earlier article "On Wings Of..."

I call for a shuttle-derived heavy-lift capability of a modular sort
(Marshall calls it Architecture 5) that will, however, also allow for the
Astronauts at Johnson (JSC) to retain their simulators while also giving us
the ability to place automated 100-ton cargoes in space in but a single
launch.

Both mini-spaceplanes and capsules must throw away their
trans-stage/retro-packages before re-entry is safely possible, and capsules
have had separation problems with these packages in the past.

With a Buran-style Shuttle II, all maneuver capabilities reside in the
orbiter's aft boat-tail that remains attached since it is part of the
airframe, where it can be retained, returned, and refueled. Its airfoils
will not need a controlled explosion to deploy, as in the case with
capsules' complexly folded parachutes. Each capsule return is, by necessity,
a ditching at best, and all require the same para-rescue jumpers we saw in
The Perfect Storm.

A large launch vehicle like Energia cost no more than did the proposed
Ariane 5/Hermes spaceplane combo', but could carry far more.

Wings may be considered by some useless, but so are an airplane's wings when
it is on the ground. We should have this capability in any event due to the
greater cross-range of winged craft.

If I place three RS-68 hydrogen engines underneath an External Tank, I can
launch unmanned 100-ton payload pods in space or large Buran-style orbiters
with 20-30 tons of interior cargo in its own payload bay - and retain that
orbiter's integral trans/retro-stage intact.

Any OSP is likely to throw away all its main engine(s) and its
trans/retro-stage as well.

The cost difference is marginal at best.

With such a side-mount philosophy, I can place large hypersonic boilerplates
in space, allowing them to separate in a true vacuum (unlike the failed
X-43) to better test future Air Force vehicles that need large-scale tests
in any event, if it is to reduce dependence on costly forward bases set up
the world over during the Cold War.

The goals of NASA and the Air Force are now one. With space assets growing
ever larger, and the number of allies friendly to our cause ever smaller,
the Air Force is either going to sulk at my own "Dagger report" here, or
buckle down and start building big rockets.

They must build large, heavy-lift rockets at some point in time.

They simply have no choice.

I leave you now with a quote from another great space book - Challenge To
Apollo. Some of the same travails that beset General Medaris were handled by
the Soviet Chief Designers in much the same way, but on a greater level,
what with Khrushchev's direct intervention like what we must have from the
current Administration today if anything is to be done.

The quote is from Lyndon Johnson:

"There is something more important than the Ultimate Weapon. That being the
Ultimate Position." If Space is indeed that ultimate position then "it
should be the goal of all free men to keep and hold that position."

I'm sure General J.B. Medaris would agree.