B - 2: The Spirit of Innovation B-2: The Spirit of Innovation Rebecca Grant Rebecca Grant Air Force No Objection, 88ABW-2013-2250, 9 May 2013; NGAS 13-0405 B-2: The Spirit of Innovation Rebecca Grant i B-2: The Spirit of Innovation Table of Contents Foreword ......................................................................................................... pg. v Chapter One: Cones, Drones, and Low Observables ... pg. 1 Chapter Two: Two Horses in the Race ..................................... pg. 7 Chapter Three: Cruise Missiles and Tacit Blue ............... pg. 15 Chapter Four: A Bomber? ................................................................ pg. 23 Chapter Five: Another Horse Race ........................................... pg. 33 Chapter Six: Risk Closure ................................................................. pg. 43 Chapter Seven: “My Airplane Blew Up On Me”............ pg. 55 Chapter Eight: A Miracle a Day .................................................. pg. 63 Chapter Nine: Slip and Recovery .............................................. pg. 73 Chapter Ten: Success ............................................................................ pg. 83 Endnotes ......................................................................................................... pg. 93 III iv FOREWORD ook skyward, and wonder. Wilbur and Orville Wright wondered if they could fathom the secrets of birds Lin flight. Every aerospace pioneer since – and every individual who has helped them – channels that very human curiosity and wonder into a desire to innovate. The lucky ones get to do it with brilliant iconoclasts, tough managers, and skilled teams, and the very most fortunate see their flashes of insight take flight. Left and below: Wilbur and Orville Wright perform early test For ten years, from 1979 to 1989, flights with two of their flying machines at Kitty Hawk the development of the B-2 was circa 1910. kept secret. Inside that black world, Opposite: The B-2 Spirit Stealth thousands of people worked their Bomber soars into the blue. wonder creating a stealth bomber unlike anything the aerospace world had ever seen. “The B-2 evolved from that very first question,” said one engineer. “What can you do in the design of an airplane when the only priority was to carry a man and be as small as possible in all the characteristic observables?”1 Observables . through radar, infrared, and the naked eye, tracking bombers had gotten easier and easier since the first integrated Could the return of radar from use of radar in World War II. a combat aircraft be measured Surface-to-air missiles and ground- and controlled to let an aircraft controlled Soviet fighters were close steal through the world’s most to locking up the borders of the formidable networks ? Soviet Union. If a bomber could not penetrate, deterrence weakened. Engineers wondered: if an under- standing of the phenomenology of radar could help improve tracking, was there a way to turn the tables? v CHAPTER ONE vi Chapter One: Cones, Drones, and Low Observables ngineers had been thinking about how to counter airborne tracking radar practically since its invention. EDuring World War II, British engineers theorized about creating a plasma field around an aircraft to obscure its radar return. If they could find a material with the right electrical properties, it could disrupt normal radar return at certain frequencies. With the war against Germany That same year, NATO intelligence raging, the British settled for a much picked up reports of Soviet deploy- quicker fix called “Window,” strips ment of the SA-2. Its radar-guided Opposite: Remnants of a World of foil dropped from bombers to missile moved at Mach 3.5 to heights War II era radar station. create a cloud of chaff and white of 60,000 feet and distances out to Below (top): British bombers drop out German radar. Window was about 20 miles. Tracking came from clouds of foil chaff to white-out German radar; such a secret technology that the gathering information about the (bottom): Soviet SA-2 radar- RAF kept it under wraps for more timing and angle of reflected radar guided missile. than a year, until the summer waves. of 1943, even as their bomber crews suffered tremendous losses. Commanders feared that just one use of Window would lead the Germans to exploit and counter it. When the RAF finally took it into combat, chaff worked wonders. Nothing came of the first inklings of designing an aircraft to minimize its radar return. But the idea lingered. In 1953, Air Force specifications for a potential new reconnaissance aircraft included the stipulation that “consideration will be given in the design of the vehicle to minimizing the detectability to enemy radar.”2 1 CHAPTER ONE Right and background: Pyotr How would future aircraft survive? the research Ufimtsev holding his book that truly unleashed the stealth Although it was a sideline, research in 1962. His revolution. in the 1950s and 1960s probed discussion of Below: The inherently stealthy at low observables for shaping James Clerk and survivable SR-71. Minuteman missile warheads and Maxwell’s cruise missiles like Snark and equations as a Hound Dog. basis for pre- As far as anyone knew, there was dicting how still no way to apply the low observ- a geometric able benefits of a sphere to a combat shape would aircraft. reflect elec- tromagnetic Under Kelly Johnson’s leadership, waves was the Mach 3 SR-71 program tried the path to a breakthrough for stealth out a few of the principles of stealth. aircraft. Because the SR-71 development was so highly classified, few knew What Ufimtsev realized was that how far Lockheed had gone in radar waves, a notch farther down exploring the potential of stealth. the electromagnetic spectrum, would behave the same way as The engineering of the day lacked optical light. Ufimtsev’s insight principles for how was to apply the principle to to measure and con- calculate the sum of the radar trol the total sum of cross sections of different geo- an aircraft’s radar metric shapes. Fortunately, it reflectivity. The best was a snooze for the Soviet Union’s they could do with censors. After all, Maxwell had radar return was died in 1879. to soak some of it up with absorbent The Soviet Union saw no national material. What they security value in the paper and it couldn’t do, yet, was was cleared for publication. to control the waves. DRONES Part of the answer was lying in What first convinced the U.S. stacks of foreign technical litera- government to push stealth forward ture, waiting to be translated by the was not research by the Russians Air Force Institute of Technology. but a strange test result with The document in question was a a miniature drone on a range report titled Method of Edge Waves in Florida. in the Physical Theory of Diffraction. The Defense Advanced Research The author was Russian physicist Projects Agency (DARPA) ran Pyotr Ufimtsev. He’d first published several experiments with miniature 2 CONES, DRONES AND LOW OBSERVABLES remotely-piloted vehicles or RPVs – Florida where operators set up a today’s equivalent of small, tactical test against the miniature drones. unmanned aerial vehicles. One mini- The big gun spat shells at the mini- RPV, made by McDonnell Douglas, RPV as it flew down the range, surprised operators with its small trying to track and engage the little radar cross section in tests at the drone by radar. Due to its size and company’s Grey Butte Microwave shape, the drone was just too small Measurement Facility range in the to reflect back enough radar energy Mojave Desert in California. for the ZSU-23 to guide its guns. The RPV data suggested that flying “The radar could not guide the gun objects with smaller radar cross accurately and the gun never hit the sections could work around the airplane,” recalled John Cashen, Soviet defensive systems. In 1973, who would soon find himself the Defense Advanced Research designing the B-2. Finally, the test Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s idea crew manning the gun had to resort factory, was impressed enough to to optical tracking. take the mini-RPV to Eglin AFB for It was a revelation. Cashen, who Left: ZSU-23/4 tracked vehicle. a bigger test against the ZSU-23. learned of the tests later, described First fielded in 1965, this formid- Above: An RPV similar to that the impact. “This was the first used in tests against the ZSU-23. able self-propelled air defense evidence, at least to DARPA, that gun quickly became the scourge you could beat a Soviet anti-aircraft of pilots because it could take on system with a reduced radar cross aircraft at low altitudes. Pilots could section,” Cashen said. “Everybody not fly low enough to get under understood based on the ZSU-23 the detection radar for SAMs if test that if you could reduce the range of first radar detection, then air defense radars searching for incoming objects would not detect and track a low observable aircraft until much later than the radar designers intended. “On top of that, it would also affect the in-close tracking, even if it was not by radar,” Cashen added. Skewing close-in tracking would ZSU-23s were with the front- interfere with higher-frequency fire line forces. They were so popular control radar. Put those elements that the Soviet Union eventually together, and an object with a small exported 2,500 of them. RCS could, in theory, get close One ZSU-23 in particular found enough to render Soviet air defense its way to the Eglin test range in systems ineffective. 3 CHAPTER ONE Low observables and drones were achieving low were worth a try observables – could a stealth com- to confound the bat aircraft be the answer? ever-increasing At DARPA, Ken Perko had already Soviet air defenses. set out to ask that question in By the early 1970s, December 1974. Perko had been the situation was recruited by Kent Kresa , who was bleak.