"Bruce Sterling - Think of the Prestige (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Canadian Defence Research Board.

However, Canada's military-industrial complex lacked the
panache, and the funding, of that of the United States. Bull, a
visionary and energetic man, grew impatient with what he considered
the pedestrian pace and limited imagination of the Canadians. As an
aerodynamics scientist for CARDE, Bull's salary in 1959 was only
$17,000. In comparison, in 1961 Bull earned $100,000 by consulting for
the Pentagon on nose-cone research. It was small wonder that by the
early 1960s, Bull had established lively professional relationships with
the US Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (as well as the Army's
Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun's own postwar stomping
grounds).

It was the great dream of Bull's life to fire cannon projectiles
from the earth's surface directly into outer space. Amazingly, Dr.
Bull enjoyed considerable success in this endeavor. In 1961, Bull
established Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project). HARP
was an academic, nonmilitary research program, funded by McGill
University in Montreal, where Bull had become a professor in the
mechanical engineering department. The US Army's Ballistic
Research Lab was a quiet but very useful co-sponsor of HARP; the US
Army was especially generous in supplying Bull with obsolete military
equipment, including cannon barrels and radar.

Project HARP found a home on the island of Barbados,
downrange of its much better-known (and vastly better-financed)
rival, Cape Canaveral. In Barbados, Bull's gigantic space-cannon
fired its projectiles out to an ocean splashdown, with little risk of
public harm. Its terrific boom was audible all over Barbados, but the
locals were much pleased at their glamorous link to the dawning
Space Age.

Bull designed a series of new supersonic shells known as the
"Martlets." The Mark II Martlets were cylindrical finned projectiles,
about eight inches wide and five feet six inches long. They weighed
475 pounds. Inside the barrel of the space-cannon, a Martlet was
surrounded by a precisely machined wooden casing known as a
"sabot." The sabot soaked up combustive energy as the projectile
flew up the space-cannon's sixteen-inch, 118-ft long barrel. As it
cleared the barrel, the sabot split and the precisely streamlined
Martlet was off at over a mile per second. Each shot produced a huge
explosion and a plume of fire gushing hundreds of feet into the sky.

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