Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (12 page)

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Sneeze-Bot.
Scientists at Weathernews, a Japanese weather news service, plan to install 200 beach ball–size robotic spheres around the country. The mission of the robo-balls will be to monitor pollen levels in the air. Passersby can then glance at the robots’ “eyes” to see the pollen levels. White eyes means low pollen, green means medium pollen, and blue indicates high pollen levels.

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Gas-Bot.
“Tankpitstop,” the creation of Dutch inventor Nico van Staveren, is a robotic arm that can fill a car’s gas tank. Attached to a regular gas pump, Tankpitstop uses multiple sensors that recognize the make of the car, locate and open the car’s gas tank, and fill it up. Van Staveren says he got the idea after seeing a robotic arm used to milk a cow.

Both the United States and the USSR experimented with a lot of crazy ideas during the Cold War, but Project Pluto may be one of the strangest of them all
.

W
HAT GOES UP
If you’re a history buff, you probably already know that the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union officially began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviets beat out the Americans by launching the first satellite,
Sputnik
, into orbit. Rockets that could lift satellites into space could also be used to launch nuclear warheads—in fact, the R-7 rocket that launched
Sputnik
into orbit was originally designed to carry nuclear warheads. The fear of falling behind the Soviets in this critical technology is what led the United States to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, and put the country on a course to the Moon in the early 1960s.

But back then, who knew for sure whether the United States would ever catch up to the Soviet Union in missile technology? What if the Russians pulled so far ahead that they developed missiles capable of shooting down American missiles? If the United States lacked the ability to retaliate against a Soviet first strike, wouldn’t that make a first strike that much more likely?

American military planners decided that they had to have another type of weapon available if the Soviets ever developed the means to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

When ICBMs are launched, they leave the Earth’s atmosphere for a time and then re-enter it at a point high above the target. Because of this, any Soviet anti-missile defense systems would be aimed skyward to detect incoming missiles. One way to beat such a system would be to use a weapon that entered Soviet airspace at a very
low
altitude—treetop level, if possible. It would also have to fly so fast that the Soviets couldn’t shoot it down even if they did manage to detect it. The effort to come up with such a “supersonic low-altitude missile” (SLAM) became known as Project Pluto.

Weapon designers came up with an 85-foot-long missile carrying anywhere from 14 to 26 nuclear warheads, and a ramjet engine powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor powerful enough to generate 500 million watts of electricity.

Ramjets are designed to operate at three to five times the speed of sound. Their name comes from the fact that at those speeds the air is literally
rammed
into the engine as it travels through the atmosphere. As the air enters the engine, it is compressed; then the nuclear reactor heats the compressed air and causes it to expand. The expanding air is exhausted out the rear of the engine, creating thrust.

Because ramjets work only at very high speeds, the SLAM would have been launched with conventional rocket boosters; the ramjet reactor would have been activated when the missile accelerated to three times the speed of sound. Once it was fired up, the nuclear reactor would have given the missile nearly unlimited range. It could have remained aloft at 35,000 feet in a holding pattern for weeks or even months on end, waiting for the command to proceed with (or abort) the attack.

If the attack order was given, the SLAM would have descended to 1,000 feet and proceeded to its first target. When it arrived at the target, it would have ejected one of its warheads through a hatch on top of the missile, like a giant flying toaster. In the time it took the warhead to fall to earth and detonate, the SLAM would have cleared the blast zone and been on its way to the next target, and then the next, and so on, until it ran out of warheads.

That was how the SLAM worked on paper; whether such a missile could ever really be built is questionable. Traveling three to five times the speed of sound in all weather, at low altitudes where the air is thickest, would have exposed the missile to very high temperatures and atmospheric pressures. The unshielded nuclear reactor would have pushed temperatures even higher, to about 2,500°F, well past the point where materials used in most jet and rocket engines would have melted. Even the special high-temperature materials the engineers did plan on using auto-ignited at just 150°F above the reactor’s expected operating temperature, so if
the SLAM ran even slightly hotter than expected, the missile could have burst into flames and disintegrated in midflight, showering highly radioactive material over a very wide area.

But a SLAM could be lethal without launching a single warhead. Traveling at three times the speed of sound at 1,000 feet would have produced a sonic boom strong enough to destroy buildings and kill people on the ground, and the unshielded nuclear reactor would have spewed deadly radiation over the surrounding region—no small consideration when it was expected that the SLAM would have to pass over countries allied with the United States on its way to the Soviet Union. The SLAM was a flying Chernobyl—so deadly, in fact, that the designers considered leaving the nuclear warheads out entirely. After months of flying around in Soviet airspace, the radiation and sonic boom would have killed more people than the warheads would have.

How would you even test something as deadly as a SLAM? There was no test site big enough to contain it, especially if it went out of control during flight. Even when the engineers tested the ramjet engine on the ground in 1961, they had to build the disassembly building two miles away from the test stand and operate both by remote control—the ramjet engine became so radioactive after firing that it would have killed anyone who got near it. The building where the engineers monitored the tests by closed-circuit cameras was even farther away and included a nuclear fallout shelter stocked with a two-week supply of food and water in case radiation levels rose so high that immediate rescue was impossible.

The logic behind the SLAM concept was probably flawed from the beginning. Its success depended on using it in a surprise attack, but once it was launched and spewing sonic booms and giant clouds of radiation in its wake, how long could it possibly have remained undetected? Lucky for us, for the Russians, and probably for everyone else on Earth, the United States pulled ahead of the Soviet Union in missile technology in the mid-1960s and scrapped the SLAM project before it ever got off the drawing board.

You’d be surprised by how many films in Hollywood are started… but not finished. Here’s a look at a few fascinating could-have-beens and almost-wases that never were
.

S
TAR WARS: EPISODES VII, VIII, IX
While making
The Empire Strikes Back
in 1979,
Star Wars
creator George Lucas told a reporter that he ultimately planned on making nine movies in the series, a project that would take more than 30 years. (He even asked actor Mark Hamill if he’d be available for filming the ninth film, which he planned to start in 2011.) Lucas said that the original three movies (
Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back
, and
Return of the Jedi
) were actually episodes four, five, and six in the saga; episodes seven, eight, and nine would depict Luke Skywalker defeating the Empire and establishing peace throughout the galaxy. Lucas did eventually make the first three episodes, but abandoned the final three. What happened? Insiders say that Lucas never wrote a script, or anything beyond a vague outline, for movies seven, eight, and nine, and what he did write was incorporated into
Return of the Jedi
.

Easy Rider
(1969) was written, produced, and directed by the movie’s stars, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. The film, a celebration of 1960s counterculture, follows two hippie bikers who travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans to search for the “real” America, a journey that amounts to taking lots of drugs, partying at Mardi Gras, and getting hassled by small-town rednecks. By 1982 America had changed so much that Fonda decided to make a sequel. The countercultural movement was out, Reagan and yuppies were in. He wanted to show the death of the ’60s ethic, so he and former
Saturday Night Live
writer Michael O’Donoghue concocted
Biker Heaven
. The plot: After a nuclear apocalypse, “Biker God” brings Fonda and Hopper’s characters back to life in order to find a magical American flag that will resurrect all the
dead. They snort the ground-up skull of Chief Crazy Horse, find the flag, and return to “Biker Heaven.” No movie studios were interested in
Biker Heaven
. Why? Because Fonda was considered a has-been and Hopper couldn’t work because of a substance-abuse problem (and probably because the story was too “far out”).

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist who researched project for years before he began filming it. In 1968 he set aside four years to make a movie about Napoleon. He read dozens of books, organized his research into thousands of index cards, wrote the script over the course of a year, and scouted locations in France, Italy, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. He also hired 75,000 extras to play soldiers, ordered 20,000 gallons of fake blood and commissioned 4,000 costumes for the main cast, making it one of the largest productions ever. (Kubrick’s choice for the title role: Jack Nicholson.) But while he was doing research, another Napoleon movie—
Waterloo
, starring Rod Steiger—beat him to theaters in 1970. When
Waterloo
bombed at the box office, Kubrick’s financial backers got cold feet and pulled out of the project, forcing Kubrick to scrap
Napoleon
altogether. He made
A Clockwork Orange
instead.

In 1979 Columbia Pictures asked Steven Spielberg to produce a sequel to
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Doing a sequel didn’t interest him, so he came up with an idea for a different movie:
Night Skies
, based on the real-life story of a Kentucky family who claimed that a group of aliens visited their farm in 1955 and tried to kill them. Spielberg hired John Sayles (
Eight Men Out
) to flesh out a screenplay. Sayles added a subplot: One of the aliens is kind and gentle, and befriends the family’s son. In 1980, while Spielberg was in Tunisia filming
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, Melissa Mathison, a novice screenwriter, came to the set to visit her fiancé, Harrison Ford. Spielberg read her the
Night Skies
script and they both realized the only good part was the benevolent alien and his relationship with the little boy. Spielberg cancelled
Night Skies
and instead directed the movie Mathison wrote based on their conversation:
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
. (The plot about the terrorized suburban family became the basis for
Poltergeist
.)

There are a lot of dishonest scams out there. From insurance fraud to phony advertising, no matter how smart you are, you’re still a potential victim. That’s why it’s so satisfying when these tricksters get found out
.

C
ULPRIT
: Saratoga Spa State Park, in upstate New York
GRAND SCHEME
: For only $20, visitors to the public resort are invited to soak in warm, pure mineral water. The park opened in 1835, but for the last 25 years, the mineral water has been mixed with regular tap water. Why? An underwater boiler had been heating the mineral water, but when it broke in 1983, park officials found it was less expensive to mix in already-heated tap water—only they kept on telling their patrons it was
pure
mineral water.

EXPOSED!
When a new state governor took over at the beginning of 2007, the New York parks department was overhauled and the new director discovered the ruse. Then the press found out and the story spread. “They’re lying to the public. It’s the state committing fraud,” complained former Saratoga Springs Mayor Raymond Watkin. The state placed the blame on the Colorado-based company that runs the park.

OUTCOME
: Today, the park is slowly transitioning back to heating the spring water pools with actual heaters—so far they’ve completed two of them. The rest of the pools still use tap water (with full disclosure), and it still costs $20 to take a bath.