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In 1990, the buckyball field flung open its stadium doors for anybody with a few gas-valves and enough credit for a big electric bill. These buckyball "factories" sprang up all over the world in 1990 and '91. The "discovery" of buckminsterfullerene was not the big kick- off in this particular endeavour. What really counted was the budget, the simplicity of manufacturing. It wasn't the intellectual breakthrough that made buckyballs a sport -- it was the cheap ticket in through the gates. With cheap and easy buckyballs available, the research scene exploded.
Sometimes Science, like other overglamorized forms of human endeavor, marches on its stomach.
As I write this, pure buckyballs are sold commercially for about $2000 a gram, but the market price is in free-fall. Chemists suggest that buckmisterfullerene will be as cheap as aluminum some day soon -- a few bucks a pound. Buckyballs will be a bulk commodity, like oatmeal. You may even *eat* them some day -- they're not poisonous, and they seem to offer a handy way to package certain drugs.
Buckminsterfullerene may have been "born" in an interstellar star-lab, but it'll become a part of everyday life, your life and my life, like nylon, or latex, or polyester. It may become more famous, and will almost certainly have far more social impact, than Buckminster Fuller's own geodesic domes, those glamorously high-tech structures of the 60s that were the prophetic vision for their molecule-size counterparts.
This whole exciting buckyball scrimmage will almost certainly bring us amazing products yet undreamt-of, everything from grease to superhard steels. And, inevitably, it will bring a concomitant set of new problems -- buckyball junk, perhaps, or bizarre new forms of pollution, or sinister military applications. This is the way of the world.
But maybe the most remarkable thing about this peculiar and elaborate process of scientific development is that buckyballs never were really "exotic" in the first place. Now that sustained attention has been brought to bear on the phenomenon, it appears that buckyballs are naturally present -- in tiny amounts, that is -- in almost any sooty, smoky flame. Buckyballs fly when you light a candle, they flew when Bogie lit a cigarette in "Casablanca," they flew when Neanderthals roasted mammoth fat over the cave fire. Soot we knew about, diamonds we prized -- but all this time, carbon, good ol' Element Six, has had a shocking clandestine existence. The "secret" was always there, right in the air, all around all of us.
But when you come right down to it, it doesn't really matter how we found out about buckyballs. Accidents are not only fun, but crucial to the so-called march of science, a march that often moves fastest when it's stumbling down some strange gully that no one knew existed. Scientists are human beings, and human beings are flexible: not a hard, rigidly locked crystal like diamond, but a resilient network. It's a legitimate and vital part of science to recognize the truth -- not merely when looking for it with brows furrowed and teeth clenched, but when tripping over it headlong.
Thanks to science, we did find out the truth. And now it's all different. Because now we know!
THINK OF THE PRESTIGE
The science of rocketry, and the science of weaponry, are sister sciences. It's been cynically said of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun that "he aimed at the stars, and hit London."
After 1945, Wernher von Braun made a successful transition to American patronage and, eventually, to civilian space exploration. But another ambitious space pioneer -- an American citizen -- was not so lucky as von Braun, though his equal in scientific talent. His story, by comparison, is little known.
Gerald Vincent Bull was born in March 9, 1928, in Ontario, Canada. He died in 1990. Dr. Bull was the most brilliant artillery scientist of the twentieth century. Bull was a prodigiously gifted student, and earned a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at the age of 24.
Bull spent the 1950s researching supersonic aerodynamics in Canada, personally handcrafting some of the most advanced wind- tu
Bull's work, like that of his predecessor von Braun, had military applications. Bull found patronage with the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) and the Canadian Defence Research Board.
However, Canada's military-industrial complex lacked the panache, and the funding, of that of the United States. Bull, a visionary and energetic man, grew impatient with what he considered the pedestrian pace and limited imagination of the Canadians. As an aerodynamics scientist for CARDE, Bull's salary in 1959 was only $17,000. In comparison, in 1961 Bull earned $100,000 by consulting for the Pentagon on nose-cone research. It was small wonder that by the early 1960s, Bull had established lively professional relationships with the US Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (as well as the Army's Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun's own postwar stomping grounds).
It was the great dream of Bull's life to fire ca
Project HARP found a home on the island of Barbados, downrange of its much better-known (and vastly better-financed) rival, Cape Canaveral. In Barbados, Bull's gigantic space-ca
Bull designed a series of new supersonic shells known as the "Martlets." The Mark II Martlets were cylindrical fi
The Martlets were scientific research craft. They were designed to carry payloads of metallic chaff, chemical smoke, or meteorological balloons. They sported telemetry ante
By the end of 1965, the HARP project had fired over a hundred such missiles over fifty miles high, into the ionosphere -- the airless fringes of space. In November 19, 1966, the US Army's Ballistics Research Lab, using a HARP gun designed by Bull, fired a 185-lb Martlet missile one hundred and eleven miles high. This was, and remains, a world altitude record for any fired projectile. Bull now entertained ambitious plans for a Martlet Mark IV, a rocket-assisted projectile that would ignite in flight and drive itself into actual orbit.
Ballistically speaking, space ca