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

The Martlets were scientific research craft. They were
designed to carry payloads of metallic chaff, chemical smoke, or
meteorological balloons. They sported telemetry antennas for tracing
the flight.

By the end of 1965, the HARP project had fired over a hundred
such missiles over fifty miles high, into the ionosphere -- the airless
fringes of space. In November 19, 1966, the US Army's Ballistics
Research Lab, using a HARP gun designed by Bull, fired a 185-lb
Martlet missile one hundred and eleven miles high. This was, and
remains, a world altitude record for any fired projectile. Bull now
entertained ambitious plans for a Martlet Mark IV, a rocket-assisted
projectile that would ignite in flight and drive itself into actual orbit.

Ballistically speaking, space cannon offer distinct advantages
over rockets. Rockets must lift, not only their own weight, but the
weight of their fuel and oxidizer. Cannon "fuel," which is contained
within the gunbarrel, offers far more explosive bang for the buck than
rocket fuel. Cannon projectiles are very accurate, thanks to the fixed
geometry of the gun-barrel. And cannon are far simpler and cheaper
than rockets.

There are grave disadvantages, of course. First, the payload
must be slender enough to fit into a gun-barrel. The most severe
drawback is the huge acceleration force of a cannon blast, which in the
case of Bull's exotic arsenal could top 10,000 Gs. This rules out
manned flights from the mouth of space-cannon. Jules Verne
overlooked this unpoetic detail when he wrote his prescient tale of
space artillery, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1865). (Dr Bull
was fascinated by Verne, and often spoke of Verne's science fiction as
one of the foremost inspirations of his youth.)

Bull was determined to put a cannon-round into orbit. This
burning desire of his was something greater than any merely
pragmatic or rational motive. The collapse of the HARP project in
1967 left Bull in command of his own fortunes. He reassembled the
wreckage of his odd academic/military career, and started a
commercial operation, "Space Research Corporation." In the years
to follow, Bull would try hard to sell his space-cannon vision to a
number of sponsors, including NATO, the Pentagon, Canada, China,
Israel, and finally, Iraq.



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In the meantime, the Vietnam War was raging. Bull's
researches on projectile aerodynamics had made him, and his
company Space Reseach Corporation, into a hot military-industrial