See, this is what happens when you don’t plan ahead adequately… the source data on this most recent contest entry is currently not accessible. The last contest showed artwork of the Northrop MX-775B “Boojum,” the supersonic and unbuilt stablemate of the MX-775A “Snark.” Some online sources on this include THIS and THIS and THIS. However, I did have a few goodies. The Boojum was to be either ground or air launched; and for air launch it could either be off the back of a B-60 bomber (which at the time was expected to be a swept-wing, turboprop-eqipped version of the B-36) or from a B-36. Two drop tanks were envisioned for the Boojum… one being a large subsonic wing, allowing for long-range subsonic cruise; and the other being a “slipper” tank that conformed to the Boojums fuselag, allowing supersonic cruise.
More on this when I can.
One Response to “Northrop MX-775 “Boojum””
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Eeepps! Ok I know we’ve had issues with testing Cruise Missiles before, and I of course recall the jokes, (mostly by the folks testing the missile-next-door at Caneveral the “never-fly-Navaho” :o) about “Snark-Infested-Waters” but I had never heard that they had actually LOST one!!!
“One bit of ridicule which outlived the program dubbed the waters off Canaveral “Snark infested waters” because of the numerous crashes. (In fact, to some, this may well be the most memorable aspect of the entire program.) At the other extreme, a Snark in December 1956 flew too far, that is, it failed to respond to control and was last seen heading toward the jungles of Brazil As one Miami paper put it, with apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “They shot a Snark into the air, it fell to the earth they know not where.” In 1982, a Brazilian farmer found the errant missile.”
“Sitting” there in the jungle for 26 years, ouch. On the ‘other’ hand the “final” navigation system worked so well that it caused the US to instigate an upgrade of all Navigational charts over a ‘failure’ of the Snark to hit a designated target. The test Snark “missed” Ascension Island and its “target” CEP (Circular Error Probability) by EXACTLY four miles. The following investigation showed that ALL nautical and navigational charts of the time showed the island to be EXACTLY four miles away from where it ‘really’ was.
Randy