Did the United States Beat Sputnik into Space? | Skepticblog | Brian Dunning
Those of us with an interest in the early days of the space race — won by Sputnik 1 in October 1957 — might need to broaden our disciplines a bit to get the whole story. It turns out that the race might have actually been won two months earlier, by the United States, with an entrant from outside the space program. Its name was Operation Plumbbob.
For six months in 1957, Operation Plumbbob put 29 thermonuclear devices to the test in the Nevada Test Range. They were the most varied in the program’s history; all sorts of devices, fired in the air, on the surface, underground, at pigs, near soldiers, and at all kinds of structures. Two of them were particularly interesting. Pascal-A and Pascal-B, on July 26 and August 27, were detonated at the bottom of 500-foot vertical shafts. Both shafts were covered with great heavy steel lids, some four inches thick and weighing some 900 kg.
Pascal-A was supposed to have a yield of 1-2 pounds, but somebody got his slide rule wrong: the true yield turned out to be 55 tons, about 50,000 times greater than expected. For Pascal-B, they added a concrete collimator about halfway down the hole. Once again, the yield was far more than expected, moreover by about six times as much: 300 tons. The concrete collimator was (obviously) instantly vaporized by the explosion, and the massive gas expansion from the concrete turned the shaft into a compressed-gas cannon. That giant metal lid was launched straight up, at what was estimated to be six times escape velocity.
Okay, so maybe the lids didn’t make it into space and disintegrated instead, but, still, cool, yeah? Props to Brian Dunning. Also, allow me to recommend Skeptoid, “a weekly science podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture, and replacing them with way cooler reality.” And, by weekly, that’s every Tuesday, on time, every week, for the past five years. Dunning is a machine. And, if you don’t like podcasts, each episode also has a complete transcript with references.
