X Descending (11 page)

Myrabo and Raizer’s paper, published by the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics and titled
Laser Induced Air Spike for Advanced Transatmospheric Vehicle
(AIAA 1994-2451), describes a “concept for a novel device”. It explains that “The principal function of an Air Spike is to replace the traditional sharp conical forebody normally proposed for streamlining an aerospaceplane”. In May of 1995, the Rensselaer Polytechnic
Review
published the first reports of a successful test of the Air Spike concept by stating, “In a major breakthrough, Rensselaer graduate students have successfully tested a revolutionary approach to aerospacecraft propulsion that may someday enable vehicles to ride an “energy beam highway” to space.” It was a profound statement, effectively removing any doubt that the concept was new in the scientific world.

When I first learned of Myrabo’s visit to see Ray’s pictures I was only told that it had been “a couple of years ago”. I had not pressed for an exact date and so, for a long time afterward, I simply accepted that Myrabo had probably seen the images in Ray’s film—film of a disc-shaped vehicle with a forward pulsing beam of energy—sometime in 1993. Statements that were attributed to Myrabo himself had seemed to support that time frame. The May 15, 1995 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology
⁶
(AW&ST) published an article on Myrabo’s new concept in which it was reported that “Myrabo has been working on the Air Spike concept since 1993”. By 1994 his broader concept for producing an “Air Spike” using laser or microwave energy was formulated and published and, by early 1995, the first successful test had been performed.

Years later, I was given a copy of a letter Ray had received from Myrabo a few weeks after his visit. It became clear that my estimate of when Myrabo had seen the pictures was off by a few years. I realized that his visit had, in fact, coincided with a conference held in March of 1987 shortly after Ray had moved from Austin to Maryland. On March 18-20 of that year, Goddard Space Flight Center held a symposium under the title “Visions Of Tomorrow: A Focus On National Space Transportation Issues”. One of the final sections of the symposium proceedings was “The Far Future: Beyond The Horizon” and included a presentation on the performance analysis of a laser-powered shuttlecraft, a presentation co-authored by Leik Myrabo
⁷
.

It was clear from looking at the sizeable amount of information I could find on Myrabo’s work that none of his earlier designs had ever included a beam of energy projected forward. At the end of the 1980’s his largest design was the previously mentioned “Apollo Lightcraft”. The vehicle he had envisioned would receive its power from energy beamed to it, but this design was for a vehicle using laser or microwave energy
for propulsion only
. None of the designs showed any hint of a Directed Energy Air Spike (DEAS), as the air spike concept was now being called. Along with the forward projecting beam of energy, one other major aspect of the designs had changed—and changed drastically. None of his earlier Lightcraft designs had ever been of purely disc-shaped vehicles.

Curiously, the term “Apollo” is still being used, but now with a different connotation. As his designs for transatmospheric vehicles began to focus more and more on disc-shapes, rather than simply calling them “disc-shaped” or “saucer-shaped”, the term “double Apollo disc” has been substituted. Ostensibly the term is a reference to the curved heat shield on the base of the earlier NASA Apollo module, though it is not the most obvious choice of terms, to say the least. It is certainly not how most people would describe the models and illustrations seen in the published papers and articles. Perhaps, as taboo as the subject of flying saucers is in the field of science, referring to the shape as two heat shields stuck together seems safer and less controversial. Perhaps too, it conveniently deflects awkward questions about why he decided to switch to a purely saucer-shaped design.

In the last few days of 2007, in what I could only see as an amazing bit of synchronicity, a letter and accompanying article came to my attention by way of Jim Klotz of the Computer UFO Network (CUFON). Dale Goudie, the founder of CUFON, had recently moved from Seattle and had given a number of documents he had collected over the years to Jim, who subsequently arranged to have these papers scanned into digital format. On receiving the finished set of files and glancing at the first few to see how they had turned out, he immediately realized he had something very interesting. One of the documents was a letter that had been sent to a Dr. John Warren, formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL). In the late 1970’s John Warren had been the Assistant Division Leader for Administration in the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Division at LANL. Curiously though, beginning in 1975 he had also served as the New Mexico State Director for MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network). Years later, perhaps frustrated with Ufology in general, but for reasons unknown, much of the material he had collected was being given away, and, because he then lived near Seattle, part of his collection had been offered to Dale Goudie. Incredibly, what Jim Klotz recognized he had found in this collection was a letter written to Dr. Warren in early 1978 by none other than Leik Myrabo!

At the 1977 MUFON conference in Scottsdale, Arizona Dr. Warren had presented a paper titled
The Scientific Method of Investigating UFO’s
, and it was this paper that somehow had come to the attention of Leik Myrabo. At the time, Myrabo was a member of the senior technical staff of W.J. Schafer Associates, Inc. in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Myrabo had written to Dr. Warren expressing his interest in the 1977 MUFON paper and asking for Warren’s comments on an article he was preparing for presentation at the AIAA 13th International Electric Propulsion Conference to be held in San Diego that April. Myrabo’s very technical article, which was included in his letter to Warren, was titled
Solar-Powered Global Aerospace Transportation
and dealt with new concepts in both laser and, potentially, microwave propulsion.

On reading Myrabo’s letter and article, two aspects of this find were most interesting to me. First, that Myrabo was, in 1978, somehow in position to see Warren’s article, a paper clearly presented in a UFO-oriented forum. Unfortunately, Myrabo’s letter does not explain how he came to read Warren’s paper or whether he might have attended the conference himself. Perhaps Warren’s paper was circulated in some other more private manner. But secondly, and perhaps more significantly, in Myrabo’s own paper he had included several small sketches of disc-shaped vehicles—including a brief discussion of the possibility of using beamed energy to mitigate shockwave effects. His sketches at that time were clearly not what he would later see in Ray Stanford’s images, but in this 1978 paper it was easy to see ideas that almost certainly helped him to immediately recognize aspects of the technology he saw when he visited Stanford nine years later.

Perhaps the most amazing bit of synchronicity to come from finding Myrabo’s letter to Warren was this: in his 1977 MUFON paper, the very paper that Myrabo read with interest, Dr. Warren actually named Ray Stanford and Project Starlight International as an example of an organization out to gather more complete data on UFO sightings. Who knows whether nine years later, as he sat in Ray’s home, Myrabo realized he was meeting with the very man Warren had mentioned by name.

Since Myrabo’s original experiments on the Air Spike concept and the announcements about the DEAS concept were first presented in the early 1990’s, a number of other studies have been done exploring the use of beamed energy as a means to reduce or modify shock effects. New applications are being explored that extend from the obvious drag reduction uses to the capability of steering control by concentrating energy beams at varying points ahead of a vehicle. A paper published by AIAA in 2003 titled “Steady and Unsteady Supersonic Flow Control with Energy Addition” (AIAA 2003-3862, co-authored coincidentally by Yu. P. Raizer, who worked with Myrabo on his 1994 Air Spike paper) cites 13 references to publications between 1959 and 1993, but 32 published from 1994 to 2003. Things definitely seemed to have heated up after 1993.

The most incredible study I found to date, and one producing an image startlingly reminiscent of what is caught in Ray’s film, is one conducted at the Laboratory of Aerothermodynamics and Hypersonics-CTA in São José dos Campos, Brazil. I first learned of this in an article that appeared on Photonics.com titled “CO2 Lasers Expose Hypersonic Flow”
⁸
. In this study of the DEAS concept, a lens was used to focus CO2 lasers at a point slightly ahead of a small 100mm disc-shaped model.

The Brazilian study was attributed to Marco A. S. Minucci and colleagues, with a brief comment that the experiments are being conducted in collaboration with “a US-based research team”. The small and very colorful image accompanying the article shows the luminous layers of the shock waves created in the hypersonic flow. It also shows the unique cone-shaped wave produced by the breakdown of the atmosphere by the energy beam. The resulting image of a disk appearing to glow inside the luminous airflow was enough to bring a smile to my face. At the time of the article, researchers were reporting detecting drag reduction of up to 40 percent!

The mention of a US-based research team was obviously also intriguing. Something about Minucci’s name rang a bell, and looking back through the information I had collected I soon found why. His name appears numerous times in papers co-authored with Leik Myrabo. Minucci, as it turns out, studied at RPI and received his Masters and Doctorate from there before returning to a position in Brazil. He is listed as a student participant in the above Apollo Lightcraft Project where he worked on Transatmospheric Vehicle Design in the fall of 1987 and Theory of Propulsion the following spring. To date, his name still appears closely associated with Myrabo and others in papers relating to the DEAS concept.

Since 1995 I have continued to watch the growing body of work on the DEAS concept, principally noting articles and papers published by other researchers who specifically referenced Myrabo’s work. While I knew of the connection to Ray and had no doubt that Myrabo’s newer designs (i.e. disc-shapes with DEAS energy beams—
Figure 13
) were virtual models of the vehicle in Ray’s film,it was still apparent that his published conceptual designs lacked a way to produce the narrow beam of energy extending over a substantial distance. With a relatively lightweight vehicle being propelled by laser energy beamed at it from the rear, where do you find the energy to fire a beam forward? Myrabo’s concept required creating the air spike by refocusing energy being beamed to it from in front or above—which clearly would require pre-existing space based laser stations. Launching vehicles into space with lasers stationed below and above is still years in the future. Likewise, disc-shaped vehicles traveling on-edge in our atmosphere and relying on those systems for propulsion must be just as far off. But the potential for using directed energy to reduce drag and shockwaves is now a proven concept that exists within our science.

Over time, images of saucer-shaped vehicles with directed energy beams have turned up in a number of intriguing places. One particularly interesting picture, originally for the Advanced Space Transportation Program, appears in the image gallery of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The concept was clearly illustrated even though it only showed a beam of energy focused to a point ahead of the vehicle rather than a beam that extended for a considerable distance. All the ingredients were there, but the illustration still missed the intrinsically beautiful aspects I had seen in Ray’s images. Even without a degree in physics and aerospace engineering it is not difficult to sense that beam probably serves purposes on a number of different levels. The illustrations were all fascinating, but it was still clear that, as happens with most science and breakthroughs, it would take more time to figure out all the details. Producing a narrow pulsing beam generating the desired results over a substantial distance was still a problem.