Marshall Space Flight Center

I recently took a trip to "Rocket City" or Huntsville, Alabama. In Huntsville is the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. The MSFC is the original home of NASA and the site of some of the most innovative science and engineering work that ever been accomplished.

So, In case you were not aware, the Saturn V rocket is HUGE.

That building behind it is about 6 stories tall.

The Space Flight Center is located on the Redstone Arsenal, an Army base that was established in 1941 and was mainly used as a chemical weapons production and storage facility. The MSFC is the lead center for NASA's work on the International Space Station design and assembly, responsible for payloads and crew training, the Space Shuttle propulsion systems and its external tank, and NASA computers and networks. Also at the center is the Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC). The HOSC supports ISS and Space Shuttle launch, payloads and experiments. The HOSC also monitors rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station whenever a Marshall Center payload is on board.

Also, Space Camp is there. I was really jealous of kids who got to go to Space Camp when I was a kid, but I am not as bitter now, mostly because I found out that they didn't really go into space like in the movie. Stupid rich kids.

There was a huge building dedicated to the Space Program and especially the Apollo program, the Saturn V rocket and the Lunar landings. Below is Command Module Casper of the Apollo 16 mission, the second to last NASA flight to the Moon.

Seeing a skyline of rockets makes one think they are in a 1950's Sci Fi comic

Another Saturn V, laid out lengthwise and broken into its various stages

Concept design for the new Orion crew capsule

How about this. Regular viewers of the History and Military channel may recognize the concept design for the Future Warrior program that they talked about so much a few years ago. It was really just an airsoft outfit in black with a motorcycle helmet and a foam gun. Somebody got paid millions of dollars to talk about what they wanted to make, then they turned in this piece of crap and got a huge amount of Federal dollars. Then they cancel the program before it produces a viable product. They could pay me to do this job for much less, I bet. It is kinda cool though.

The Space Flight center had a great display of current and former rocket based weaponry of the US Armed Forces in their "Rocket Park".

The AN/TWQ Avenger is a specialized turret mounted on a Humvee chassis for use as air defense platform. Above you can see the Stinger Missile pods and .50 caliber machine gun on the back of a Avenger. The Avenger can be linked to the Forward Area Air Defense Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (FAAD C3I) system, which permits external radar tracks and messages to be passed to the fire unit to alert and cue the gunner. The government deployed Avengers to the White House around the first anniversary of 9/11. They have also been modified for use in Iraq as convoy protecting gun trucks.

This is the MIM-72 Chaparral, another air-defense platform, this time based on the M113 APC chassis and mounting four missiles based on the AIM-9D Sidewinder air -to-air missiles. The US forces have never used the Chaparral in combat, although it has been used by US Allies. It is now retired from use by the US Armed Forces.



Here we have the Hawk , designed as a medium range anti-air missile. It was in service for more than 40 years in the Army and apparently being phased out of Marine Corps inventories, but I would imagine that they are pretty much gone by now. The Hawk system, consisting of the launcher, missiles and a variety of different radars and control stations has been improved many times and the system was used to good effect in several conflicts. In 1973, Israeli forces launched 75 Hawk missiles and are credited with destroying between 12 and 24 aircraft. Kuwaiti Hawk batteries claimed 14 Iraqi planes shot down in Iraq's August 1990 invasion. Two of those kills have been confirmed, a MiG-23BN and a Su-22.



Going even further back, we have the Nike Hercules missile, a multi-role, two-stage solid propellant missile introduced into service in 1958. It was used in the high and medium altitude air defense role by the US and its NATO allies. It was also possible to use the Nike Hercules as a surface to surface missile. The Nike H was optimized for shooting down bombers and when it ballistic missile technology superseded the nuclear armed bomber, the Nike H became less useful. All the missile sites were deactivated in the CONUS by 1974, except for a few in Alaska and Florida. The Army continued to use truck mounted Nike Hercules systems as a front line air defense platform until the early 1980's when they began to be replaced by the Patriot Missile System. Most other NATO Nike units were disbanded with the fall of the Soviet Union.


This is the M270 MLRS, the Multiple Launch Rocket system. It is one of the most powerful and long ranged conventional weapons in the US Army's inventory. It is a rocket artillery system and is capable of sending its 12 270mm rockets to a range of 42 miles in 60 seconds. One MLRS firing all 12 rockets can completely blanket one square kilometer with submunitions. As a result the M270 is sometimes referred to as the "Grid Square Removal Service" As standard metric maps are divided up into 1km grids. It also fires the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) which is ballistic missile capable of reaching out to 186 miles, with the warhead going as high as 164,000 feet. The MLRS has been in use since 1983 and seen use in Iraq and Afghanistan. 1,300 M270 systems have been manufactured, along with more than 700,000 rockets. The missiles can carry a variety of payloads, many of them using smaller submunitions. This kind of attack is very devastating to airfields, marshaling areas and exposed troops. During the Gulf War, the Iraqi soldiers were said to refer to the M77 submuntions as "Steel Rain." The M270 is no longer in production, with the last units produced in 2003 sold to the Egyptian Army. MLRS has been somewhat superseded in US service by the HIMARS, a lighter, C-130 transportable, wheeled version that only mounts one "six pack" of missiles


Of course, it is interesting to remember the source of space flight and the space programs that it came from. It was all started by Werner Von Braun and the German rocket scientists who used rocketry to kill thousands of civilians at the behest of Adolf Hitler. In the closing days of WWII, the Allies competed for the German prototypes, plans and especially scientists. Above you can see a V1 Buzzbomb, the first cruise missile. In total, the V-1 attacks caused 22,892 casualties (almost entirely civilians). One could try to be optimistic and think that the Teflon, Tang and satellite navigation that we have gotten from the space program has made up for the deaths, but, since we still have thousands of ICBMs, I think the jury may still be out. That said, I believe that the space program is one of the most amazing things America has ever done and it is of the utmost importance that we continue to move forward with space exploration.

German V2/A4 rocket, the first man made object to reach sub orbital space.
It was the foundation of both US and Soviet space programs

Original plans for the V2, detail photo below

Captured by the US Army's 76th Infantry Division

North Korean Military Might

Kicking a goat. What a stupid asshole.

Military Technology -Decoy Vehicles

One way that you can frustrate the desires of your enemy in war is to deceive and confuse him.
Decoy versions of military equipment like trucks, tanks and planes can effectively deceive the enemy, help to reduce damage to the commander's real equipment, reduce casualties, and waste enemy resources of time, men, and materials. Unlike more traditional types of camouflage, the purpose is not to hide assets from the enemy but to divert the enemy from the actual forces and equipment, which can be a proactive strategy for defense or a way to gain the initiative. This idea was used extensively in WWII. The British used it in the North African Campaign, using rubber tanks to confuse Rommel's recon planes. In the lead up to D-Day, an entire strategic plan of deception was used, called Operation Fortitude. It involved double agents, false radio traffic, phantom divisions (including their shoulder patches) and of course, rubber inflatable decoys of tanks and trucks.





This idea has continued to be useful into the modern era of the Cold War and beyond. The technology has continued to advance and modern decoys are multi-spectral and can even fool some satellite and aerial reconnaissance. They can achieve this through systems that mimic the IR signature of the real vehicle. They are designed to have the same shape, size, radar reflection and infrared signature as a real tank, truck, or plane.One way to do this that has been discussed is simply putting a microwave within the decoy to give it warmth and a radiation signature. while any of these decoys would have a certain rate of failure, the basic concept is very good. No less a strategist than the great Sun Tzu recommends using deception as much as possible to put your enemies off balance.

F-16 decoys

Another thing to keep in mind with the use of decoys and deception is that it does not have to work perfectly to be effective. Even if only half of the enemy scouts, intelligence personnel, and senior leaders believe something, it can slow down their response times, lead to conflicting orders, or any other thing that will hamper and confuse a military force.while deception may not be able to turn the tide of a battle or war by itself very often, every little but helps and the low cost and relative ease of deception operations can be very effective from a cost/benefit point of view. The US Army has decoys of the M1 tank that can be set up in minutes and can be carried in a duffel bag. Sometimes they are carried with the tank formations themselves, not to distract the enemy but to inflate the number of tanks he thinks he is facing.

Air defense vehicle decoys made from flat elements, by Rusbal,Inc.

Decoy M47 Patton tank from the Cold War

There is a word in Russian that refers to military deception, camouflage and concealment. It is maskirovka (literally: camouflage, concealment). We in the west do not generally borrow words from Russian, probably because they are hard to say, but this is a good one. The Russian and the Soviet military before them were masters of military deception. Want some proof? Look at some of the pics below. Another use of decoys is just to waste enemy resources. Recon aircraft or satellite operators need time to do their work, and even a few wasted minutes can make a difference. The Russian SAM decoys below are made to force enemies to expend valuable ordinance on them, while hiding the real ones for use later. All in all, pretty clever stuff.

Su-27 decoy from Shape International, Inc.

Russian S-300 Surface-to-Air missile launcher decoys from Rusbal

Spotting a hidden handgun

Here is a fun one: tips on how to spot a person carrying a concealed pistol.

The International War

I could be fairly accused of being overly focused on America and Americans on this blog, so I thought it would be good to post some photos of the many thousands of others from dozens of countries that are fighting the war in Afghanistan. This is not intended to be a comprehensive review of every country that has sent men or materials to Afghanistan to attempt to make it a real nation. So if your country is not included in the pics below, (and many are not) it is not because I am trying to snub you, I am just lazy. All these pics were in my files already.

Canadians

Norwegians

Croatians

Germans

French

Poles


Dutch PzH-2000 155mm


British

Australians

New Zealanders? or Kiwis if they prefer

Danish Leopard 2 tank

Danish Special Forces

Romanians


British Mine clearing vehicle

and lastly, of course the Afghan Nation Army

ACU

Military Technology- Razzle Dazzle Camouflage

In an effort to better protect ships from attack, especially from the threat of submarines, British artist and Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Norman Wilkinson devised a camouflage scheme for warships at sea. The idea was to use a pattern of angular, geometric shapes and lines in bold, contrasting colors. The scheme became known variously as Razzle Dazzle, Dazzle camouflage or Dazzle painting. It was used a great deal on the ships of the Royal Navy and others in WWI. It was used as late as the end of WWII on some American Navy ships.




About this time, after viewing the above picture, you may be thinking that artist/camouflage designer Norman Wilkinson perhaps became confused and drank a glass of turpentine while he was working. That might explain trying to conceal a 600 foot long, 11,000 ton ship by painting it in purple star bursts. But the point was never really to hide the ships from view. Rather, the aim was to make ships trying to fire on the ship confused about the direction, speed, size, and range of their target. So the point was really to confuse the rangefinders and gunners of the enemy, not to hide from their lookouts and scouts. The hope was the Dazzle camo would make the enemy unable to identify the ship, or to tell whether they were looking at the bow or stern, or even if it was approaching or sailing away. Rangefinders of the early 20th Century operated on the co-incidence principal. The idea is that the ship is targeted with the rangefinder and the operator sees two half-images of the ship. He adjusts the knobs until the images meet up and finds the range based on tables and such. The camouflage was supposed to hinder this by making a pattern that seemed to not match up correctly at any range. Also, the dazzle patterns usually had a false bow wave to throw off accurate estimation of the ships' speed.

In a 1919 lecture, Norman Wilkinson explained:

The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. [Dazzle was a] method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked.... The colours mostly in use were black, white, blue and green.... When making a design for a vessel, vertical lines were largely avoided. Sloping lines, curves and stripes are by far the best and give greater distortion.

RMS Empress of Russia, painted with Dazzle camo as troopship in WWI

The British painted over two thousand ships with Dazzle camo in WWI, much of the work was supervised by artist Edward Wadsworth. The patterns and colors were different for each ship, and each pattern was tested in miniature before being used. The small wooden models were viewed through a periscope and the patterns evaluated by Naval personnel before being scaled up. Most of the models were constructed and painted by women from the London Royal Academy of Arts.

Man, that is just nauseating

Razzle dazzle was evaluated and selected by the US Navy in 1918 and the Navy continued to use it to varying degrees through the end of WWII. All of the Essex-class carriers and Tennessee-class battleships were painted with Razzle Dazzle camouflage. Rather than the unique designs of the Royal Navy, the US Navy decided to standardize the process and paint the various ships with tested and approved designs.

Was Razzle Dazzle effective? Well, your guess is as good as mine. It is very possible that the protection was negligible. Even if if worked well for a little while, it is certainly possible that the Germans could have found technology and tactics to work around it. In post war reports, the British Admiralty decided that it had no effect on the success of submarine attacks. They did however, feel that the bold and brightly colored ships inspired higher morale in both the ship's crews and the public. So I guess that was nice.

Whether or not the idea working in WWI, by the end of WWII it was close to completely obsolete. The amazing jump in effectiveness of naval based reconnaissance planes made many of its features useless, and the technology of visual rangefinders got better as well. With the advent of radar and radar range finders, Dazzle camouflage was done. There are however, some people who stated that it was still effective against submarines, which at the time usually needed to stalk their prey from underwater and their only view of the target was from tiny periscopes just inches off the surface.

HMS Belfast with the camouflaged paint scheme it had during WWII