This week's curious story will mark the occasion of last week's second (manned) launch of SpaceX's Dragon capsule to the ISS by taking a closer look at alternative methods to achieving escape velocity*. Though mostly overlooked next to the triumphs of chemically-propelled rockets, there was a time when pioneers looked at the stars and dreamt up radically different approaches to getting there. This is short tribute to some of them in a two-part series.
Part I: Space cannons
At the center of this story stands Gerald Bull, a man who could most succinctly be described as Canada's very own Wernher von Braun. Both men bore a striking physical resemblance** and at some point in their lives' showed very little regard for the nature of the regimes they served in their pursuit of reaching outer space.
Bull was born in 1928 in North Bay, Ontario. At 16, he joined the brand new aeronautical engineering school at the University of Toronto where one professor later noted that "he certainly didn't stand out" (which did not prevent him from completing his PhD on supersonic wind tunnels and becoming the youngest PhD graduate in the institute's history).
However, when he suggested building one to test missile designs for the Canadian military, it was deemed too expensive. Unperturbed, he came up with a cheaper alternative: firing missile scale models from very! large artillery pieces and observing them go supersonic. When his funding was finally cut, he left Canada to work for its southern neighbour where he promptly set up another very large gun and started test firing aircraft models over the Atlantic (reaching 40km in altitude). In 1957, with all eyes suddenly on the Space Race following the launch of Sputnik, Bull seized the moment and leaked a story that Canada would soon match this feat by placing a high-velocity gun in the nose of a US Redstone missile (which was a complete fabrication). However, rather than ending his career, he soon graduated to even larger guns - this time by securing a US Navy surplus 16-inch battleship gun (for $2000 plus shipping). Unfortunately, now back in Canada, people showed little enthusiasm towards the idea of firing a 16-inch gun in their backyards and so he moved his research to Barbados. While Bull was busy firing test vehicles from his new gun, he funded his research by supplying atmospheric meteorological data to the US army (which his test vehicles would measure at 60km above sea level). When he started reaching orbital altitudes with his test vehicle, the Canadian government once again became interested and funded an even bigger gun (basically two 16.4-inch guns welded together to form a 33m gun barrel that could fire a projectile up to 180km into the sky) - Project HARP.
HARP 16-inch (410 mm) gun
When in 1967, his funding finally did run out, Bull reinvented himself as an international artillery consultant. It was during this time that Iraq under Saddam Hussein asked him to build a cannon capable of launching satellites into orbit. Bull drew up plans for a device with a barrel length of 156 metres ostensibly capable of placing a 2 ton satellite into orbit - Project Babylon.
Two sections of Big Babylon that have been bolted together at Royal Armouries, Fort Nelson, Portsmouth.
Building a 2100 ton cannon naturally aroused some suspicion given the geopolitical neighbourhood and Bull ended up being assassinated in Brussels in 1990 - a murder which was never solved. Some efforts were made later to revive the idea (e.g., project Quicklaunch) but nobody came close to it again.
Here are links to Bull's wikipedia page and Project Babylon (the Iraqi space cannon)
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*Escape velocity is the speed at which an object's kinetic energy exceeds the gravitational pull on it. For our planet, hitting Mach 33 (or 11.17 km/s) will buy you a no-return ticket to the solar system (provided you can avoid burning up while leaving the atmosphere)
**Here are pictures of Gerald Bull (left) and Wernher von Braun (right) at roughly the same age.
For those newsletter readers less familiar with von Braun, here are the cliff notes: he built the first rockets capable of reaching space under the Nazi regime (who used it to attack the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France) and later (working for NASA) became the chief architect of the Saturn 5 rocket which launched the Apollo moon missions.
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