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By Root 839 0

great ingenuity. In this case, Rich and his team didn’t exactly fix the problem. Instead, they created a go-around that made things not so life-threatening for the pilots. Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time. After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.

In addition to the problems the pilots were having getting the airplane up to speed, there were problems with the electronic countermeasures, or ECMs. The reports being analyzed back at Langley said if Operation Skylark was to happen over Cuba, cruise speed would have to be at a minimum Mach 2.8, because there was a real chance that the Soviet radar systems in Cuba would be able to detect Oxcart flights and possibly even shoot them down. While Project Palladium officers continue to work on jamming methods, the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon decided that the solution lay in working to enhance stealth. The phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further. This meant that Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick and the radar cross-section team were summoned back to Area 51.

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with Kempster-Lacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

It was ironic, to say the least. Not the flip-flopping by the Air Force but the concerns about radiation. By 1964, the government had exploded 286 nuclear bombs within shouting distance of Area 51. One year earlier, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibiting nuclear testing in the air, space, or sea. The initiative had been in the works for years but negotiations had repeatedly failed. Now that it was finally signed, testing had moved underground. Neither superpower trusted the other to honor the commitment for very long, and the number of tests per month actually accelerated after the treaty; the idea was to stay weapons-ready in the event one side broke the treaty. Between September 1961 and December 1964, a record-breaking 162 bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site inside underground tunnels and shafts. Nearly half of these explosions resulted in the “accidental release of radioactivity” into the atmosphere.

In addition to weapons tests, the nuclear laboratories were racing to find ways to use nuclear bombs for “peaceful applications.” This included ideas like widening the Panama Canal or blowing up America’s natural geography to make