Flimsy Excuse

All of the digital models I have built since 1994 have had an individual as the cuing focus. I just finished reading, "Assured Destruction" by David Bath, Naval Institute Press, 2020. The person I knew had been a B-45 "Tornado" navigator and then a Ballistic Missile Wing commander in North Dakota. His name was Lt. Colonel Maurie Rosner (USAF, ret'd). He had decided to buy mutual funds after 1968 and "fund" his living with the growth of the instruments and simply plow his income from working at Douglas Aircraft into more mutual fund shares. He shared with me a book called "The Canadien Air Force Aerobics Program". He bought a Spanish classical home on Los Alamito Bay and went swimming every morning in the bay as well as working out in accordance with the book.

You have to read the book to appreciate my own career exits. From Douglas "classified nobody." From United Technologies Pratt & Whitney Aircraft of Government Products Division "anonymous nobody." Maurie got laid off in 1968 with many others and bought a business selling and installing Rayne water softeners as well as the continuous recycling of 100 pound salt tanks.

The second person then would be Sidney Moglewer who was an expert in game theory and the origin with John Von Neumann. Sidney, became the President of the Sierra Club after many years of hiking on Mt. Whitney. He broke off from puzzling over the San Onofre nuclear reactor and joined the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The last name in this spurious network of ties is Captain Tom Cassady USN (ret'd). I met him in the T-10 temporary building in Washington, DC when I briefed the Navy Fighter Study Group headed by Admiral "Whitey" Feightner. When I bought and read a book about RPV's made by General Atomic, I found he had become the President of the company head by a very old man, Mr. Blue. In 2009 at Tailhook I stopped by the General Atomic booth and inquired about him and they said they had never heard of him.

Here at EAA where some designs now are represented by Chinese and some by Russian interests as well as in GrabCAD where I reveal some to my models, have filtered the presence of anything that International Trading in Arms Regulations (ITAR) as well as what might have just been overhears or curiosity. Poverty is the actual filter that keeps me uninteresting. The books that are coming out now about the cold war and how Missileer challenged pilot and then remote pilot through a satellite connection puts a veil over international connections that seemed so raw in 1947. I have joined the ASTM to congeal my name dropping of terms like 4130 Chrome-moly and 7075 T-6 that a librarian called "buzz words" to diminish the marketing value of a vocabulary I exchanged with engineering roommates in college as I lent them my Professor Ruel V. Churchill Engineering Mathematics textbooks. Fourier Series begat FFT when computers bloomed. Complex Variables maybe gave me a path to Aerodynamics through Joukowski airfoils.

Donna Skidmore of NASA gave me an escape from Military by sending me the complete Space Transportation System documentation. I bought from NTIS the complete set of Apollo and Skylab Biomedical records to better retain my moments with Hal Bauer, the Manager of Human Factors who passed away very early in my career. Then Dr. Burrows the Director of Biomedical soon also passed away.

The book, Assured Destruction" makes clear to me now why I never met anyone who designed, developed or manufactured a nuclear warhead ballistic missile. It happened before 1964. By then only the solid fuel Minuteman built by Boeing mattered. Later I would meet the Commercial Space Booster (CSB) which was assigned to TRW where Neal Ellis had gone and invited me to make an application in one of the Tishman Buildings in Redondo Beach.

I met the CSB as a triple element Titan with two of the elements as solid boosters in an article in the SAE Journal. The AIAA Journal of that era had an article that included the Thor-DELTA with 9 auxiliary solid fueled boosters. The exact stopping point for my own potential operational or mission work on a liquid fueled large rocket was with the interplanetary Centaur as a candidate for upstaging a Space Shuttle. Nope! The PWA Field Engineer for the RL-10 engine that UTC had bought from North American Rocketdyne was Billy R. Warner who created a training manual for a quick course in the F-100 Augmented turbofan for all us new Field Engineers to be doubled up with existing -100 at F-15 bases and new at the upcoming F-16 bases. He became a good friend as he prepared for his Florida State Licensed Engineer Test after working years beyond his alma matter in Daytona Beach.

Many of us are not going to fly a homebuilt with a FADEC engine, a Fly-by-Wire airplane control and Carbon Fiber-Reinforced plastic structure but still the work with Boron has lifted us a bit. Will our fuel ever be a cryogenic like hydrogen when the solid fuel so cautiously dismissed LOX and efforts to replace mono-propellent like hydrazine in satellites and even solar sails seem so near.

Here I am pushing buttons on my watch after layers and touch screen on Polar, then Garmin brands. My telephone did not survive as a clamshell when I took a trip on British airways to experience the CFRP Boeing 787 I had been pressed to predict 33 years before.

At my first real job the saying was that in Operations Analysis I had 20 years of experience in a 5 year old profession the day I walked in. Operations Research was a different thing and included time and motion study. There was ORSA and MORS for that and the American Ordnance Association became the National Security Industrial Association the year they sponsored a Energy Conference in the State Department Conference Room the year that I met Dr. Steven Dean, the coordinator of all the different means of peaceful Fusion power, Tokamaks, Lasers, all in a flow path guaranteed to achieve beyond break even but major output.

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Originally Posted by 2ndsegment

The book, Assured Destruction" makes clear to me now why I never met anyone who designed, developed or manufactured a nuclear warhead ballistic missile.

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Eons ago, I was in the group that was studying on-orbit self defense for satellites. One option we looked at was basically a flying bomb rack that would co-orbit with a critical satellite and fire interceptors at ASATs closing in.

Our interceptors would have conventional explosives, but we looked at using a radar altimeter from nuclear bombs to trigger our warhead. Big problem is that said radar was designed to activate based on an Earth-sized mass getting close, while our postulated targets were a wee bit smaller.

Ron Wanttaja