Uninhabited Aircraft

A modern air force must have more than well-proved airplanes. It must have advanced designs that are still being tested, aircraft still in the drawing-board stage, and designs that are still gleams in an air designer's eye. Military aircraft are slow to develop, hard to build; every U.S. Army warplane that played a part in World War II was on the drawing boards before Pearl Harbor.

The present standbys of the U.S. Air Force (the B-36, F-80, etc.) are much like the airplanes of late World War II. Behind these in the development series stand strange-looking craft like the Northrop Flying Wing and the six-jet Boeing B-47, neither yet ready for service. Even farther away from military use are odder airplanes, such as the model 7002 Consolidated-Vultee Delta wing, which looks like a big bomber's tail with the rest of the bomber missing (see cut). So far, the Delta wing has had only its test flights.

Womb of Death. Looking far ahead, the Air Force likes the notion of a guided missile, an "uninhabited" aircraft, probably rocket-driven, to arch from continent to continent under remote control. No effective guided missiles are yet in existence, but Army, Navy, Air Force and the Research and Development Board are working hard--and optimistically--to perfect them. Last week they made a joint request of Congress for a Long Range Proving Ground. During 1949, said Air Force General Muir S. Fairchild, the U.S. will have a 500-mile missile ready for testing, with no place to test it.

The Long Range Proving Ground, said Brigadier General William L. Richardson, U.S.A.F., should have a launching site within the continental U.S. and a range at least 3,000 miles long. At intervals along the first 500 miles, the range should have check points. There will have to be "impact areas" too, where the missiles can land without killing innocent bystanders. The range should have a climate not too cold or rainy.

How these requirements can be met, Airman Richardson did not say. The U.S. has no region like the desert of Australia where the British Commonwealth's missile center, Woomera ("Womb of Death" in the aboriginal language), has 1,200 miles of desolation to shoot over.

The request for a 3,000-mile range was proof that the missile men had some hope of solving problems that were regarded a few years ago as Buck Rogerish dreams. A guided missile is no mere pilotless bomber shepherded by a nearby mother plane. According to M.I.T.'s Dr. Karl T. Compton, new chairman of the Research and Development Board, a missile must fly near its target unaccompanied and have some sort of "seeing eye" to recognize the target and steer toward it. Admittedly, this is a large order.

Word from Space. The problem of "midcourse guidance" might be solved, according to some experts, by automatic celestial navigation, the missile watching selected stars and steering by them. The "terminal guidance" problem, i.e., landing it on the target, is tougher. No one has explained publicly how a "seeing eye" could recognize a target by any influences it sent out (heat, light, magnetism) which the enemy could not screen off or simulate. The missile could not send back the observations of its eye by television, like the television bombs of World War II, for human brains to analyze. Since the very short waves used by television do not follow the curve of the earth, this method would be effective for only a few hundred miles.

But there is a theoretical way of "seeing around the earth" and guiding a missile that may explain the continued official interest in artificial satellites (TIME, Jan. 10). Granted the development of nuclear-powered rocket motors, it would not be impossible to establish such a satellite revolving round the earth like a tame moon. If its orbit were several thousand miles high, it could watch a good part of the earth (see diagram).

The guided missile, watching the ground by radar, could send a televised radar map to the satellite. A repeater on the satellite could relay the ever-changing map to the missile's launching place. When the target came into view, control officers, watching the relayed map, could send last-minute instructions, by microwave, and steer the missile down on the target's heart.

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