Sep 012011
 

Another take on the idea of launching an ICBM from a large jet aircraft: shoot it out the nose.

Patented in 1977, this concept from Lockheed would involved firing a Minuteman-style ICBM through a single launch tube out the nose of a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane. Better still, within the cargo bay would be a rotary structure holding four ICBMs, much like the cylinder of a good old fashioned revolver. The bottom-most missile would be fired through the “barrel” by means of a high pressure gas charge; the cylinder would then rotate the next missile into place for firing.

Missile launcher for aircraft

All in all, this seems like one of the goofier concepts for an airborne ICBM launcher. The potential for catastrophic failures seems fairly large.

 Posted by at 5:44 pm

  7 Responses to “Flying Boomers 3: Sure, Why Not”

  1. By God, you did find something on the concept!
    I always wondered if my coworker was BSing me about it, but it was real after all.
    Considering all the maintenance problems the C-5 had in its early days, a modified 747 made a lot more sense from a reliability point of view.
    The idea of carrying huge numbers of nuclear-armed cruise missile on a launcher aircraft like a flying missile sub has two problems:
    Even if the per-missile price with nuclear warhead is reasonable, once you start to stick dozens on a aircraft, and making dozens of aircraft, the overall price gets pretty high.
    …but that’s nothing compared to problem #2:
    If one of them crashes, you’ve got a nuclear material contamination clean-up problem from hell.

  2. Pat,

    Same problem with BUFFs or Spirits carrying multiple nukes as well. Thus, it was deemed an acceptable risk.

    The thing that gets me about both the “in fuselage vertical launch” concept and this, “fire it out the nose,” concept is how pointlessly complex it all is.

    Far, far simpler just to roll the things out the back of the aircraft. Hell, even rolling them out the sides of the bird would also do.

    What propellant the missile has to expend stabilizing itself as it fires up would be minimal and most likely less than what was saved by launching it some several miles up to begin with.

    And, if the thing failed to ignite its motors then it’d just make a nasty – but small – mess below. Using any sort of high pressure gas ejection system seems just to be asking for it and the idea of firing a missile against the 500mph airstream seems exceptionally stupid to begin with.

    Madoc

    • “Same problem with BUFFs or Spirits carrying multiple nukes as well. Thus, it was deemed an acceptable risk.”
      IIRC, in the case of those two, I think the maximum nuclear bomb payload for a strike was considered eight, and they wouldn’t be flying around all the time, like during “Chrome Dome”, but loaded with them for a strike mission after hostilities began.
      The Spanish Palomares Incident* made them reconsider the “Chrome Dome” concept and cancel the whole idea of nuclear-armed bombers on 24/7 patrol because of the political ramifications if a crash occurred over land.
      At least missile subs went to the bottom of the sea if something went way wrong, where the water itself served as shielding in both a radiation and political sense (out of sight, out of mind).
      The thought of a crash over land also played a part in the cancellation of the Nuclear Powered Bomber project. Very bad in a political sense if it happened over the US; horrible if it occurred over another country. The Soviets would have a field day with propaganda like that, and that’s the sort of thing that could have caused a popular movement to pull out of a western defense alliance, or drive unallied countries straight into the Soviet orbit.

      “Far, far simpler just to roll the things out the back of the aircraft. Hell, even rolling them out the sides of the bird would also do.”

      Of course, that’s exactly what they did with the Minuteman/C-5 test.
      The thing on its pallet slid out the back of the cargo bay, opened parachutes that pulled it into a vertical orientation as it descended, and then fired.

      * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

  3. The missiles themselves look like finless Skybolts in the patent drawings, Which makes one wonder what the advantage of this system over carrying four Skybolts on the B-52’s wing pylons was: http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-48.html
    Certainly not simplicity. 😀
    Though no one ‘fessed up to it at the time, Skybolt got killed because it was TOO good; it gave the ability to do a surprise decapitating C&C strike on the Soviet Union that they would have too little time to respond to in retaliation after detecting it was happening.
    That would defeat MAD, and put them on a hair trigger for WW III, with the incentive for doing it to us before we did it to them.
    Shooting Poseidons or Trident D-3’s out of the tubes would have been an interesting concept.

  4. The best part is going to be reading the citations. In the old days, they’d consider stuff that was even wilder.

  5. It would have been nice to have seen this test fired. Let ILM design a klingon Bird of Prey while this thing would have fired like one…

  6. This might have been better than any other launch mode. I wonder if this were meant to fire while the plane was nearing a stall so as to limit airspeed. You might not want to touch the control surfaces, but hitting flaps while trottling down might help persuade the missile to come out during launch. The sabrejets flew a parabola–or part of one to release bombs before moving away, doing damage to wingboxes on repeated tests.

    I wonder if this were to fly like the vomit comet and fire from different angles…

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