Birds of Mars

Behind a black wall of secrecy, the U.S. is climbing slowly toward a new level of warfare. In every U.S. aircraft factory, every technical institute and every electronics laboratory, the military phrase of the day is "guided missiles." What are these missiles? What is the source of their power? What can they do? Herewith a report on the newest weapons of war by TIME'S Science editor, Jonathan Norton Leonard:

THE desert Tularosa Basin in southern New Mexico is a valley without a river. Fierce winds sweep across it, and dust devils whirl in the sun. On most days the valley is quiet, with only a scattered coming & going of military vehicles from White Sands Proving Ground (Army Ordnance) or Holloman Air Force Base. But sometimes a screaming roar echoes among the mountains, and a monstrous bird with a tail of flame flies straight into the sky. Or a slender, dartlike object slips out of the belly of a B-29 and streaks over the horizon at several times the speed of sound.

These "birds" (so the missilemen call them) are the heirs presumptive of war. They fly from New Mexico; from Point Mugu, a pleasant Navy station on the coast of Southern California; from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida; from the deck of the Navy's converted seaplane tender Norton Sound. Few ordinary citizens have ever seen them fly. Few more have heard their roar or seen their soaring sparks of light or puffs of dust on the desert. But in closely guarded factories all over the U.S., the birds are hatching. The head of one U.S. aircraft company predicts that within ten years they will dominate air warfare, and that piloted aircraft will be used only for transport.

Weapon Genetics. The new war birds are direct descendants of the three great inventions of World War II. Only one of the three--radar--came to full use in combat. The German V-2 rocket, a scientific triumph but a military failure, was developed too little; the atom bomb came too late. Both were held over as unfinished business for the next meeting of arms.

But things have changed since then. Radar and its electronic relatives promise exact guidance for the new missiles. The atom bomb makes even the most costly of the birds a sound military investment. From this ancestry have sprung the four principal types of guided missiles now under development.

SURFACE-TO-AIR* missiles, designed to bring down enemy aircraft, are gracefully tapered objects, 10 to 15 ft. long and 1 ft. or less in diameter. They are launched from a kind of gunmount. On their tails they have four fixed fins arranged at right angles to one another. These keep the missile stable in flight, like the feathers of an arrow. The control surfaces are four small, triangular, movable fins one-third of the way back from the missile's nose. They can steer the missile, roll it and even give it lift, like an airplane in flight. All the fins have supersonic shapes; they are made of solid metal, with thin, diamond-shaped cross sections.

AIR-TO-AIR missiles (fired by aircraft against other aircraft) need not be as big as their ground-launched relatives. They need carry less fuel because they do less climbing. Surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles may well spell the doom of conventional bombing tactics. Even when they rise all the way from the ground, the flaming birds will reach the bombers' altitude in something like one minute. They cannot be shot down and they cannot be dodged. They close so fast that a bomber's "evasive action" is like the slow writhing of a caterpillar trying to shake off a wasp.

AIR-TO-GROUND missiles are the bombers' best chance of passive defense, may allow them to stay out of reach of their new enemies. The air-launched missiles will be "airplanes" powered by rocket motors that may push them up to 2,000 m.p.h. They will not look like airplanes; their fixed tail fins will have respectable size, but their four movable wings amidships will be metal triangles only a few feet long. The slim, sharp birds will swing out of the bomber's belly on two stiff arms. When fired, they will shoot ahead and vanish with blinding speed. Their accuracy need not be "pinpoint," for they can be made big enough to strike with atom bombs.

SURFACE-TO-SURFACE missiles are the biggest family of birds. They will range from modest "artillery" rockets to vast intercontinental monsters (still in development) whose designers already complain that they are in danger of "running out of earth." A typical surface-to-surface missile is about the size of a V-2 (which was 46 ft. long, weighed 12.5 tons), but looks slimmer and longer. It is stabilized like the V-2 by carbon vanes acting on the gas blast from the rocket motor. It has more power than the V-2 and presumably much more range.

Rockets & Boosters. Basic to all guided missiles is the rocket motor, generally liquid-fueled. When actually pushing a bird it vanishes in seconds, leaving only a vapor trail to remember it by. In its captive state--on a test stand, for example, at Reaction Motors, Inc. of Dover, N.J., or at Aerojet Engineering Corp. of Azusa, Calif.--it has a frightening sort of beauty.

When cold, the motor itself is not at all impressive. Sometimes it is cylindrical; sometimes it has a distorted "Mae West" shape. At one end is a flaring tailpipe, at the other a complex snarl of pumps, tubes and valves (see diagram). But when the motor fires, things happen fast.

In a fraction of a second, a long, stiff, roaring flame stands out from the tailpipe. With some fuels the flame is bright, and must be observed through dark glasses. Sometimes it is faint blue with bright golden "leaves" (caused by Shockwaves) standing stock-still in its core. With certain experimental fuels the flame is brilliant green with clouds of purplish smoke.

The noise is beyond description: a ground-shaking roar combined with a high-pitched scream. On top of this rides ultrasonic sound that tears at the vitals, seeming to bypass the ears entirely.

The rocket motor takes an appreciable time to get the missile moving fast enough for the tail fins to grip the air. So most surface-to-air missiles are launched by boosters attached behind the missile's tail. These contain a solid propellant (a slow-burning explosive) that gives an enormous push for a second or so, and starts the missile fast enough to fly straight and true. When the booster bums out, it falls to earth with a whickering scream. The liquid-fueled motor takes over and brings the missile up to speed--several thousand m.p.h.

Ram-Jets & Planes. Not all missiles use rocket motors exclusively. Some have ram-jets, powerful jet engines that burn fuel (gasoline or kerosene) with the air that is crushed into their open noses by the speed of their flight. The great advantage of ram-jets is that they need no oxidizer (e.g., fuming nitric acid), which makes up two-thirds of a rocket motor's fuel load. Their chief weakness is that they have no starting thrust, and are not very efficient until they reach supersonic speed.

Ramjet enthusiasts are sure that these faults can be overcome by rocket boosters to get the ram-jets started, or by launching them from fast airplanes. Many ramjet missiles have been tested already, and some have vigorous admirers in the armed services. They will have to stay in the atmosphere, say at 70,000 ft., but they will gather oxygen as they fly, and their controlling fins will always have air to act upon.

It is the vast power of rockets and ramjets, realized in speed, that makes guided missiles so important for war. The German V-2 was as brainless as an artillery shell, but it plunged toward the ground at 3,000 m.p.h. Not a single V-2 was ever shot down and most were not even seen.

Since the V-2 days, the missiles have taken on even more range and speed. Just as important, they have acquired brains (computers) and senses (guidance systerns) to put them on their targets. These new devices, which bring weapon and target together, give the new missiles their devastating power to destroy.

Riders & Seekers. The simplest guidance system for surface-to-air missiles is radio "command guidance." The invading bomber will be tracked by a radar on the ground. When the missile is fired, its image will appear on the radar screen. Then the missile's radio pilot (safe on the ground) will steer his destroying bird close to the bomber, where a proximity fuse will explode its powerful warhead.

Another possibility is beam riding. As soon as the bomber is discovered by radar, a narrow radio beam will be trained upon it. The missile will contain electronic apparatus to pick up the beam and steer the missile toward its center. As the beam swings with the motion of the bomber, the missile will swing, too. Coached by an automatic computer, the beam operator can lead the target (like a hunter leading a duck) and set the missile on a true collision course.

These systems have a common weakness. Their guidance is fuzziest just where it should be clearest: close to the target. Seeking or homing missiles will be free of this disability. Ground guidance will bring them to the general vicinity of the target. Then they will be on their own, to search for the target with their own senses and brains.

Passive seekers will pick up an emanation (light or heat) generated by the target and steer themselves toward it. Active seekers will send out radar pulses and steer toward anything solid enough to bounce them back. A hybrid is the semi-active seeker. In this system, a ground transmitter will illuminate the target with powerful radio waves. These, rejected from the target, will be picked up by the oncoming missile and will guide it in for the kill.

Television Steering. For air-launched missiles directed against invisible targets many miles from the mother plane, the problem is more difficult. They must gather their own guiding information. They may seek the target, attracted like deadly moths by the heat given off by a city or industrial area. More likely they will watch the ground ahead with radar or television eyes. The picture will pass over a microwave beam to the mother airplane. Sitting in his cockpit, the bombardier can watch a screen and see what the missile itself sees. If the missile is off its course (as determined by a map), he gives it radio hints that point it toward the target. When the doomed city comes in sight (at 30 miles per minute), he turns the missile downward. Then another radio signal or an automatic fuse explodes its atom bomb.

This baleful guidance system is not so futuristic as it sounds. Television-guided aircraft have already flown over U.S. cities. The remote-control pilots several hundred miles away saw rivers, bridges, buildings. "We picked out the city hall," said one pilot. "We could have flown that plane right into the mayor's office."

The television or radar-picture guidance system is good only for some 500 miles. At greater distances, the microwave beam between missile and mother plane will hit the curving earth. But less range than 500 miles is plenty for many vital missions. Keeping safely out of reach of enemy radar, the bomber could launch its attack. Presumably both plane and missile would keep radio silence until the missile has only minutes to fly. This would leave time for the guiding system to correct the course of the missile. It would not leave time for enemy interceptors to reach and attack the bomber.

Stars & Magnetism. Surface-to-surface missiles will have a wide choice of guidance systems. If the target is visible (from the ground or a high-flying airplane), the missile will be steered to it by radio command guidance. Usually the target will not be visible, but its position will be known on a map. Then the missile will follow a radio beam or steer automatically toward a selected point in a pattern of radio waves marked out in space. When it reaches that point it will curve downward. If the target's position is not known accurately, the missile will search for it with television or radar eyes, reporting its findings to a screen at a faraway control point. An operator watching the screen will steer the missile to the burst point.

Beyond the range of line-of-sight radio (a few hundred miles) the guidance problem gets tougher. The missile is on its own, and it must steer itself by some "frame of reference" that reaches all the way to the target. Several systems are in development, two of them familiar in principle: magnetic (compass) navigation and navigation by the stars.

Magnetically guided missiles steer, like ships, by following automatically the pattern of the earth's magnetic field. When a long-range missile is guided by "automatic astro-navigation," it flies by night and has wise little telescopes to pick up certain stars. Photosensitive tubes note the position of the stars. This information, processed by a complicated electronic brain, tells the missile the course it is following over the surface of the earth. It corrects its own course if necessary; it knows when it reaches the target and when to explode its bomb.

Test Flight. Developing a missile is astonishingly difficult. It demands new metals, new chemicals, new electronics, even new kinds of thinking that only computing machines can do fast enough. There is, in addition, a very special headache. A missile cannot be flight-tested by a human pilot who lives to make his report. Once the missile is fired, it is gone forever. It turns into junk on the desert or sinks under the sea. So the missilemen have developed other methods of testing their single-flight birds.

The missile's first flights are generally made on a calculating machine, such as the REAC (Reeves Instrument Corp.) analogue computer used by CalTech at the Army's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena. The performance characteristics of the missile's components go into this brainy machine in the form of dial settings; the results come out as curves drawn on paper. A simulated flight takes only a few seconds and costs almost nothing. Between flights, adjustments can be made to see if the missile can be improved by altered tail surfaces or controls. To test such details by actual flights would cost a whole missile each time.

Real flame-and-metal tests are done at ranges equipped with elaborate instruments to catch and record every shred of information. The Army, whose domain is ground-launched missiles, does its testing at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. The Navy uses White Sands too and also conducts tests at Point Mugu, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, or from the Norton Sound. The purpose of both Point Mugu and the Norton Sound is to support the fleet in its introduction of the new weapons.

The Air Force tests a great variety of missiles at Holloman near White Sands. Its Patrick Air Force Base at Banana River in Florida (150 miles south of Jacksonville) will be the testing ground for missiles of all the services that have ranges too long for safe testing elsewhere. Patrick's advantage is that it can fly its birds over the thinly inhabited Bahamas, where a chain of instrument stations is now being built.

Sacrifice on the Desert. A "shot" at White Sands Proving Ground or Holloman Air Force Base is solemn with ritual.

The dusty desert to the east of the Organ Mountains is sown with nonhuman eyes: radars, telescopic cameras, instruments to measure the missile's enormous speed. Housed in small concrete buildings or perched on platforms, they cover the whole range, which is roughly 40 miles wide and 100 miles long. Roosting on high mountains are astronomical telescopes with 16-inch mirrors that can photograph the missile like a planet in space.

Among these stations run 8,000 miles of wire, and through the web throbs a pulse: an accurate time signal from a central station. The missile stands graceful and alone in the center of this great assembly like a sacrificial victim eyed by a thousand priests. The time signal beats the seconds over a chain of loudspeakers, and a grave voice counts the minutes before the moment of sacrifice. "Zero minus ten," chants the voice. "Zero minus nine, zero minus eight . . ."

In the peak-roofed concrete blockhouse near the launching point, red lights on a control panel are turning to green. All of them must be green before the missile is fired. If one light remains red, it means that some instrument or safety precaution is not in operation. Since 1947, when White Sands tossed a V-2 into an uninhabited hillside at Juarez, Mexico, some 50 miles away, the base has been preoccupied with safety. If a missile becomes "errant" (threatens to fly off the range), a safety officer "destructs" it by exploding it in the air.

At "zero" the bird flies off, trailing a shattering roar that echoes from the Organ Mountains. It disappears quickly in the deep blue sky. For human eyes the flight is over, but instrument eyes are still watching. The antennas of the radars crane to follow the missile. The telescopes and cameras turn. When the missile starts falling they follow it down to its death far off on the desert.

Melody from Space. Sometimes the reports from the missile's instruments are recorded on magnetic tape in the form of audible tones that make a strange sort of music. The first thing heard when the tape is played back is the sound of the missile at rest. It is standing on the launching platform and is still at peace with the world. Some of its instruments make continuous tones, deep or shrill, like the drones of a bagpipe. Others report only at given intervals. These play a weird little tinkling tune, over & over, like a schoolboy proud of mastering his first piano exercise.

When the missile is fired, some instruments change their pitch as the temperature rises in the combustion chamber or the pressure increases. The tinkling melody plays on, but as the missile gathers speed, unpleasant sounds obscure it. The control fins struggle to keep the missile straight. Vibration builds up with the speed and makes a quavering growl. When the missile rolls, it sends out a long, often-repeated groan. All the sounds blend together, like modernistic discords on top of the tinkling melody.

At last the missile rises above the earth's atmosphere, and the discords die away. While the missile flies its vacuum course, there is no air to make it roll or vibrate. The fins no longer move. The bird is at peace in space, serene as an asteroid, and its instruments sing the cheerful song of a happy child.

When the missile curves back to the atmosphere, trouble starts again. The fins renew their struggle. Vibration and roll build up. Louder & louder rises their clamor, drowning the melody. Then comes a crackle of jumbled noise. The missile has reached the end of its flight and the singing instruments are dead.

Brain Problem. Missilemen feel that the propulsion question is now near its solution. Modern rocket motors are already powerful enough for most practical purposes and ram-jets are coming along. Guidance is a deeper problem. It is comparatively easy to design electronic senses and brains that will enable a missile to do almost anything, but building them so they will work dependably is another matter. Many a missile has misbehaved because of the failure of a 50-c- electric relay. "That bird cost $100,000," the missilemen say. "It should have cost $100,000.05."

An additional hazard is enemy countermeasures. Whenever a bird is in flight, it is possible, at least theoretically, to interfere with the forces that guide it. The enemy can confuse the poor bird by jamming its radio frequencies. He can make it seek electronic mirages to lure it to destruction. He may even seduce it by false instructions and make it destroy its friends.

Much work has been done on gadgets to prevent such misfortunes, but the battle of counter-measures will never be over. New tricks and counter-tricks will always be possible. This eerie electronic warfare is the job of special groups in all the services. When countermeasure officers visit White Sands, the missilemen "treat them like Russians."

Dropping the Pilot. When military soothsayers try to look into the future, they confess to considerable bewilderment. None can now predict how the new weapons will react upon one another and upon older weapons. Another unknown quantity is their cost, which is sure to be high. But many advantages are gained by dispensing with the human crewmen, who need space, visibility, heating and cooling, oxygen and pressurizing apparatus. And the crew of the modern bomber is an expensive item itself; it takes money and time to train its members.

Since the missile makes only one flight, it needs no fuel for a return trip. It has no landing gear or defensive armament. All these savings cut its cost while improving its performance. Probably the biggest saving will come from reduction of running life. A missile must be dependable, but it does not have to be built (like an airplane engine) so well that it will last for thousands of hours. In most cases a few minutes or hours is all the life it needs. When designers and manufacturers adjust their thinking to take advantage of this fact, great savings will result. One authority believes that if all possible savings are realized, a guided missile will cost only one-tenth as much as an airplane built for comparable duty.

The Age of Missiles. All the experts agree that guided missiles make the most difficult problem that military scientists have tackled so far--more difficult even than atomic bombs. The program has already drained the country dry of specially qualified scientists. Every missile plant and laboratory has a welcome for the dewiest young technician. When large-scale production begins, the pinch will be even tighter. Some missilemen think that the Government should shut down the television industry to free electronic men for guided-missile work.

No one thinks that the age of missile warfare will come all at once. It will Develop gradually, painfully and expensively, with many costly mistakes. There will never be a golden age of push-button war, with the U.S. getting all the victories and the enemy getting all the grief. The older weapons, including the small-arms of the infantry, will still be needed, and must not be neglected. The Russians undoubtedly have missiles too. They captured thousands of German V-2 men and put them to work at once.

The missilemen seem to love their roaring, destructive birds. They admire their naked grace and praise the flash-quick cleverness of their electronic brains. But in their more reflective moments, they are likely to quote or paraphrase an aphorism which they attribute to Einstein: "If World War III is fought with atom-armed missiles, then World War IV will be fought with clubs."

*A compromise of military terminology between the Army's "ground-to-air" and the Navy's "ship-to-air," now agreed upon by all services.

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