Project Hydra

SCIENCE

Missiles and satellite-launching rockets are plenty complicated in themselves, but the pads from which they take off are even more complex. They are tangles of cranes, wires, dugouts and flame-deflectors, and as they increase in size they soar in cost. Besides being expensive, the launching pads are vulnerable; if a present-day rocket explodes on its pad, it may do millions of dollars of damage. The pad for the upcoming Saturn rocket, for example, will cost something like $30 million, and if a Saturn explodes on takeoff, it will destroy most of this investment and spread devastation for acres around.

Last fall Navy Lieut. Commander John E. Draim of the Naval Missile Center at Point Mugu, Calif, wondered why the ocean, which the Navy naturally loves and appreciates, could not be used as a launching pad. A water pad would be costless, he figured, as well as self-cooling and self-healing.

Last week the Navy demonstrated the early results of Lieut. Commander Draim's idea. A group of Navy hands took a pickup truck to a lagoon at Point Mugu and unloaded a crude wooden missile about 6-ft. long. Navy frogmen put it on a rubber raft, paddled 200 ft. from shore and dumped the model overboard. It floated upright with the point of its nose in sight.

The frogmen returned to shore, paying out an insulated wire as they went. After a short countdown, an officer pressed a button, sent along the wire an electrical impulse that touched off a small, solid-propellant aircraft rocket in the model's tail. The model rose sedately out of the water, climbed to about 60 ft. and plopped down again. It all looked too easy to be true. Nothing but water was needed to hold the rocket upright, and only water was affected by its blast. Even if the rocket had carried 1,000,000 Ibs. of fuel and had exploded, its pad would have returned to normal in a few seconds.

The Navy officially talks of the water-launch system, which it calls Project Hydra, as being used for very large, space-voyaging rockets. But military uses may be more important. Solid-fuel missiles, built so that they will float nose-up, might be anchored under the surface in protected places such as the lagoons of Pacific atolls. They would be easily moved, hard for an enemy to find, and almost impossible to damage except by the near-pinpoint hit of a nuclear weapon. Their guidance systems would know exactly where they were, so they could be programed to strike in any desired direction. If an all-out war started, the high-flying minefields should be able to rise from the sea, triggered by electrical or sonic code signals, and carry their megaton warheads to far parts of the earth.

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