Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist with Dr. Pamela Nenges.
Hi, this is Dr. Pamela Nenges with Sometimes It Takes a Rocket Scientist, and today we have
Dr. Robert Bartholomew for our premier podcast, Enjoy Part 1. Bart, how are you doing?
Wonderful. I'm actually in Ohio where I was when we were first connected, and I'm still working
at 83 years old, and I'm working a little bit on hypersonics.
Well, I want to introduce you as our premier podcast for Sometimes It Takes a Rocket Scientist.
Yes, right, and I'm one. Yeah, and to say that, hey, you were responsible for some of my training.
I was getting my doctorate, and really quickly you were head of the National Aerospace
plane, the X-30, you were the director for the United States Air Force.
Yes, yes. And when I met you, you were head of the systems directorate as director,
and as director of the Air Force base. And I did very quickly, I did my doctorate in integrated
propulsion and airframe kind of stuff, controls, and we both had serious interest in machine learning
and AI. I had my bachelor's degree actually in biomathematics, artificial intelligence.
Wonderful. You were a pioneer there.
Yeah, I was.
You were.
That's why I did it. I did a student-associated program in math and developmental neurobiology
because you had one course in computer science you could take in AI at that point in the
universe.
That's amazing.
Yeah, and you were lucky to find somebody who could actually teach it.
Yeah, and now everybody's an AI expert.
Oh, God, and it's really unfortunate because most of the AI we're talking about is so limited
and so narrowly defined, and I wish Congress and the other folks would get ahead of the
curve, but that's another conversation for another day because we want to talk about
really some of the early innovation in high-speed vehicle work, and that was horizontal as opposed
to vertical, so not rockets or launch systems as we know them, not the rockets, but as space
planes, rocket planes, and of course the X-15 was one of the first.
That was a very complex vehicle for its day, and some 40 years later, you guys took on
a really challenging concept in the X-30 program, and I can remember you telling me that it
was this wonderful vehicle, but from a military perspective, you could take it down with a
pea shooter.
Right, that's right.
Well the problem with hypersonics is that if you mess up the flow in any way, it's going
down.
It's a wonderful concept, scramjets and things like that, and especially if I understand
there's a new flat-bottom society, which is the part of the hypersonics program, and we
had a flat bottom with a big scooper, essentially, and some very complicated engines in there,
but the problem with complication is that it's kind of like the digital world too, right?
You are vulnerable.
Well, I think you know I've been working on some different models and different concepts
over some 20 years.
I did my work in this integrated kind of concept, which I carried on and developed some functional
structures, smart structures to do things, and we came up with a pretty cool space plane
two-stage to orbit, nothing terribly fancy, and it is the aerodynamic design, if you want
to call it that.
It's still kind of brute forcing things, you know how that goes, a hybrid of lifting body
way wider kind of vehicle, and it's done a great job.
So in your mind, as we move into hypersonics, what can we learn from what you did at NASP?
Well I think the biggest lesson was not technical, it was probably managerial, and there was
a positive lesson as well as a negative lesson.
The positive aspect of it was we got everybody in the entire country involved in the NASP
program.
It was kicked off, and maybe your listeners would like to know this, by President Ronald
Reagan's last State of the Union address in 1986.
He got up like John Kennedy had done about 20, well maybe 10, 20 years before, and said
we're going to build an airplane that will fly around the world and will fly into space.
This is Ronald Reagan.
He neglected to say when, and if you remember Kennedy's speech, he says in three years we're
going to the moon.
Okay well Reagan was careful enough, and he was a wonderful man.
I actually worked for him and Dan Quayle and George H.W. Bush during the NASP program,
and I did get to meet these very important people, and I remember Dan Quayle about two
years later, he was sort of in charge of the program because the Vice President is in charge
of NASA, Air Force, BDRNE, DARPA, you know all the different groups that were involved
in hypersonics, and he looked at me and said, can we do this?
I said, we can do it.
Again, like Reagan, I never mentioned when, and so he said, well let's go do it.
I think the biggest lesson from NASP was, I would say organizational managerial, and
that is you can get the nation to work together and to share technical information in a collaborative
way by promising them that later if there's money to be made, you can go competitive.
So we essentially ran a five-year program with everybody sort of giving their best,
including the companies.
Now that's the hardest part, right?
I think anyways the companies are a bit reticent to share their information, but we had everybody,
Boeing and Lockheed and everybody involved in the program.
The ones that kind of emerged as the leaders were Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, General
Dynamics, and that to me was the most important thing that if it's a national program, if
it's one that you know you get the president to say it's important, kind of like the Moon
program, but in this case Reagan said let's fly around the world, they agreed.
And so my biggest job was managing literally 5,000 people in many, many different agencies.
But I think that's worth saying because if there's going to be a real push for hypersonics,
however they want to do it, I mean I'm not going to suggest any particular agency or
whatever, it really should be joint agency, joint companies, joint academics work together.
And that'll get you very, very far.
The negative lesson was that we over-promised.
I mean not intentionally, not knowingly.
I mean after all, NAS ended in 1991 and so if you just do the numbers, okay that's about
30 years ago, 25, 30 years, 35 years ago, right?
Yeah, it's 24 already.
And we didn't have the technology then, but we thought let's give it a go.
And I think we tried very hard.
We got a lot of people very, very excited.
And I think the silver lining around over-promising is that people don't know better and so they
try things that are extremely high risk but high payoff.
And we did indeed get some breakthroughs, particularly in the propulsion area.
I think that was our biggest good because we worked with scramjets, we worked with scramjets,
we worked with low-speed systems that kind of went from Mach 1 to Mach 3.
We already knew how to do Mach 3 because of the Blackbird work.
And I flew the Blackbird and tried to control the engines above 3, 3.5.
And then that was not the biggest problem.
The problem today and then was how do you get to 7 or 8 and how do you do that stably?
And I love your concept.
I think there's two ways of looking at what you propose.
The way you have done it, which I think is very, very sound, very practical, very doable.
The rocket to get you up to a certain speed and then you go from there.
I also think, and I think there are some investigations where you use ramjets and scramjets and whatever
the first stage system is to get to about Mach 6 or 7 and then you use rocketry of some
sort because there's very little air up there.
That was the NAS concept.
Get up to 7 or 8 and then now we had this fascinating concept of catching the air on
the way up and using it as the oxygen.
So, it's doable.
It's accessible as you say, it's doable.
There's so many programs now.
I'm sure you and your listeners are much more aware than I am of all the programs going
on.
There isn't a school of note that doesn't have a hypersonic activity program, Institute
even.
There's not a company in the aerospace world that isn't at least playing with this thing
and seeing what's going on.
The government, my goodness, the government has so many people going on this.
James Weber, who was one of my pals, my colleagues, even in the NAS days is now heading up the
DDRNE program, which is the DOD program in hypersonics.
I haven't talked to James yet, but I hope he pulls together the team.
So good lesson, bad lesson.
Collaboration is wonderful.
And it's hard to get in a competitive world.
But on the other hand, it pays off tremendously.
So I'll stop there.
Well that's cool.
And I think that's really interesting because one of the, I don't know if you recall, but
my internship, because I had to do a doctoral internship because of the program I was doing,
was looking at using expert systems with AI agents and how you manage large scale engineering
and databases for programs, programming.
And in the recent years, my father started his career on the Manhattan Project.
He was an engineer for DuPont.
And I have all his papers and I've been going through them and reading.
It's amazing.
What you're talking about with NASP is similar to what they did on the Manhattan Project,
though commercially from an enterprise perspective, it was radically different.
DuPont didn't take any real money for the project other than their expenses because
in their mind at that point, the world was a different world, that the new science they
were learning would change their world, which it did.
I see some extraordinary similarities between NASP and DuPont.
And NASP was a classified program.
And the one company I want to do a call out to because they were so nice to me when I
was working on my doctorate, I can remember calling you in your office one day and I think
you had a general sitting in the lobby.
I think I did.
I always loved that.
And I said, hey, who do you know with Slush Hydrogen?
And you gave me like three names and telephone numbers and I called them and one guy was
like a VP of Ball Aerospace.
Yeah, right.
A wonderful guy and he sat on the phone with me for like an hour and gave me a tutorial
on Slush Hydrogen.
So working with you was fabulous because all I had to say, well, Bart said, oh, what time
do you want to talk?
Well, that was the good old days.
They don't really respond that well to me right now.
I mean, we're still a lot of friends.
You know, Pam, you're one of the first that's directly reached out to me.
But a lot of people, yesterday I was invited to kick off the Air Force Institute Technology
Hypersonics Program.
And I don't know if he was Jose Cambreros.
Does that ring a bell?
Yeah, it does.
Yeah.
He's running the AFFET program now.
So I think of you, I think of James Weber, I think of Jose as young, young people when
the NAS program was going on.
I mean, you were...
I was a kid when the NAS program was going on, but now I'm middle-aged.
I'm an actor, for God sakes.
My followers in middle-aged, now my colleagues, they're gone.
Plus some of them are truly gone, but most of them have long retired.
And every once in a while, I don't know if you remember Ted Wierszpinauski.
Oh, love Ted.
W plus 12.
Yeah.
W plus 12.
So he is living in Florida in Punta Gorda.
And we just met up the other day and we had great old wine parties, you know, reminiscing
the fun days of NAS.
He was a test pilot for the X-29.
Yeah, I know.
I'd love to interview him at some point.
Oh, I'll tell him.
Yeah, I'll ask him or I'll give you his address.
Okay.
That's great.
I'm a tester.
You know, I got 15 years as a flight test engineer because I've done so many...
I've driven everything but a gyrocopter or a submarine.
Okay.
I've driven everything.
Did you get a chance to fly in the Blackbird?
No, I have not.
Well, I did.
And I actually did some engine control during the flight.
And we actually...
I don't know if I should say this publicly, but I think we actually went too far.
It went a little bit faster than what the engine...
And the pilot said, whoa, you know, we better get down to 3.5 or whatever, you know, what's
the max speed?
And we were up to 90,000, 92,000 feet.
I saw the curvature of the Earth, you know.
And I think this is kind of a trivial reason for hypersonics, but it's a personal and maybe
even spiritual reason that if you get up that high with a hypersonic vehicle, you don't
have to go all the way to lower Earth orbit, which you can, of course, with that vehicle.
But you get the same effect.
It's called the overview effect that the astronauts have had where they looked out on this little
blue ball and, you know, and then see anything but peace because from that altitude, you
are getting this atmosphere and all that.
But then you think to yourself, boy, there's a lot of trouble going on down there.
I hope they solve it pretty quick.
Yeah, we don't have borders drawn on the planet.
No, that's right.
That's a great point.
Great point.
Yeah.
Well, one thing I want to do really quickly is that you had an interesting background
before you became an SES executive person in the Air Force.
You were MIT trained, Ohio State trained.
You did work at Tela Homa.
Yep.
Did you work at MHD?
Magneto hydrodynamics.
Yeah, that was fun.
And we still haven't captured the potential of magneto hydrodynamics.
Big law of war.
That's how we met.
I was introduced to you because I was working on a wind tunnel in my workshop slash laboratory,
which is a 200-year-old carriage house, and basically built a little wind tunnel where
I could do, because I was trained in physics, look at ionized profiles for different aerodynamic
effects in terms of leading edge extensions and how do we change airflow, because a big
part of what we want to do in hypersonics is reduce the thermal profile of the vehicle,
particularly at the bow and just in the front part of the space plane or spacecraft or aircraft,
space plane I should say.
And that was, you know, for many years, the vehicle we had, basically the front bow of
it was a block of machine titanium.
Yeah.
It's guaranteed it wouldn't disintegrate.
Right.
It's pretty hot up there.
Because you want to keep that shockwave separated.
Yeah.
Because if it can lose your separation, you are really in trouble.
You're in big trouble.
Yeah.
Ted Wierszmonowski, since we just mentioned him, said, if I fly this plane and we get
in trouble, just like you said, Ted, I'm going up.
I'm not going down.
I'm firing the rockets.
Get out of here.
How was the reentry profile for that?
For NAS?
Uh huh.
Yeah.
Well, of course, we never really tested it.
I mean, we just have wind tunnel testing and things like that.
Well, the reentry is a whole different situation because the airplane at that point is much
lighter.
You know, you've used up every possible thing.
And you're right, slush hydrogen was the preferred fuel for the NAS program.
That's always been an issue.
And just because of the difficulty, the logistics of slush hydrogen.
I really do believe that a lot of the work going on right now in the Scranton world and
the hypersonics world are looking at fuels that are much easier to deal with.
May not be JP whatever, but it might be something else.
The reentry, we did do a lot of work on the reentry and it was quite different than the
takeoff obviously.
You know, you got a lot of speed.
I would think that it might gain from learning how the shuttles came down.
And one of my good friends, Charlie Kamada, I don't know if you met him or know him.
He's an astronaut that went up a year after the tragic tile problem that crashed the vehicle
over Texas.
He was a materials engineer.
And Charlie went up with the new set of tiles and systems that they had.
And he says, you know, you can't ignore reentry here.
Just as Ted said, it's safer upstairs than it is downstairs.
He was referring to there ain't anything up there you're going to hit, you know, whatever.
But coming down, you better watch yourself.
If anything goes wrong there, it's a plummet.
And of course, that tile catastrophe did crash the plane and I think it fell off or something.
So Charlie went up on the it took a year before NASA was willing to fly again.
And so Charlie went up on that.
A big part of it was they lost the gear door on the left wing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it coming down ain't no simple thing.
No, no, you don't want to skip.
No, right.
Yeah, you don't want to skip.
And you know, when I fly an airplane just like you do, coming down is usually pretty
controlled, especially with commercial airlines.
I mean, you could you could do it blindfolded, but still, you know, you don't want to mess
up.
The ground is beneath you.
Yeah.
Hey, another question.
You were director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Yes.
Yeah.
Serious question.
I was at one time a member of probably close to a dozen professional societies when I was
younger.
And do you think professional societies today are doing everything they should be doing
in terms of the formation of engineers and the way businesses are operating in this country?
Because we seem to be ignoring small businesses where a lot of the innovation is.
Absolutely.
So, you know, that's a that's a fascinating question.
I thought about that myself, because, you know, when you think of national programs,
you know, what what is a better national entity than an institute, a society like like a university
like you just mentioned?
I mean, they supposedly have no prejudices, you know, all everything's good, everything
that moves science forward.
And they are very important with young people.
I think, you know, I was a member of AIAA director.
I used to go to all these high schools and colleges and all that and try to the other
thing they can do is steer.
I don't mean negatively steer the kids, the students rather, to areas of great importance,
because any given university might take in a young freshman, you know, who might be brilliant
at the time.
And if I was working aeronautics or hypersonics, they will have a sweet spot.
That university will have professors that are doing it.
What I think AIAA and, you know, similarly, IEEE and all other ones, you know, could could
really look at the future and look at the needed technologies and the needed capabilities,
which includes human beings, and steer that in the proper direction.
People don't have to abide by what they say, but it's neutral, right?
In theory.
And so if they say the real, you made an interesting point.
The real problem, maybe heat transfer, okay, or maybe hotspots or something like that.
Okay.
So, you know, aeronautics may never get too involved in that.
But a guy in, sorry, in hypersonics, but in aeronautics or materials engineering, they
make, oh, let's try to fix that.
You know, let's let's work together.
I still think, Pam, and I think that's why NAS was so wonderful, that that multi technologies
is where the future is.
Okay, not not a technology aeronautics or hypersonics and materials.
It's where you get a young materials engineer talking with a, you know, scramjet hypersonic
guy, and also a fluid flow guy from, you know, I don't know what department that chemical
engineering let's say, okay, and you get them talking.
And I think we all know that while professors and very eminent professors are smart as heck,
the innovation comes from the individual and the individual and the younger, honestly,
God, you know what I'm working with five fifth graders right now.
Fifth graders on a problem is the problem.
How to extract a astronaut that gets trapped for whatever reason in a crater on the moon.
That's something that we're going to have to face probably a few years, you know, and
that's not an easy problem.
I got 50 kids who are in an academy, a steam Academy, not STEM, but steam, and they are
working on this problem.
And they are coming up with the most interesting solutions that are, you know, nothing that
NASA is thinking about.
So the younger, I mean, there's a limit, obviously, but I'm telling you a fifth grader who's 10
years old, roughly speaking, okay, can give you a lot of wild ideas that of course the
engineer has to say, well, wait a minute, that's not practical.
But these kids are so smart today.
I mean, as soon as I posed the problem, they wanted an hour off.
And I said, why do you want to know?
Oh, we have to go to Google.
We have to find out what's out there, you know, which I think is wonderful.
Let's figure out what's out there, you know.
So yeah, I think the societies could really do more.
They're kind of, I don't know, they're kind of like honorary things today, in a way.
I mean, a lot of them are honorary, you know.
Well they tend to ignore the small companies that are doing innovative stuff, which I don't
understand.
And unfortunately, a lot of the folks in Washington take their leads from what the professional
societies are doing.
Sure, sure.
I don't know if you remember, but I was a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts fellow.
And the reason I'm saying this is NIAC at that time was under the University Space Research
Association.
So it was at arm's length from actually NASA.
And the interesting thing about that is Dr. Bob Casanova built a virtual think tank and
he was able to access small businesses, national laboratories, universities around the country
and bring in new ideas in how to do things.
And I actually said, hey, let's see if we can use a neurogenesis algorithm to control
a smart structure.
And what kind of devices do we need to do that?
And they funded it.
And basically, okay, it's a flapping wing map.
Okay, fine.
That was my demonstration.
I said, so let's see if we can do it.
Well, in a year's sense, yeah, we can do it.
And all of that, basically, it's the foundations of what's become neuromorphic computing and
intelligent mechatronics and all those things, because we're not going to be able to divide
our world into disciplines anymore.
Absolutely.
It's going to be applications, not disciplines.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm now also getting involved in something very different.
And that is global responsibility for the future of our young people, which is beyond
technology.
And I'm not an expert.
I'm not a theologian.
I'm not a philosopher.
But I wrote a book called God Light.
And I'd be happy to send it to you, Pam, if you don't have it.
And I have an Udemy course on God Light.
And it's not religious.
Okay.
So I mean, the title obviously will perk up people.
It's mostly a scientific explanation or whatever, a very basic for I mean, it'll be way under
your head.
But for most people, it's you know, it's just at the boundary.
I mean, if you want to talk about Big Bang, you know, that people go, what's a big bang?
And you and I know that.
But it allows people to think that, look, there's a lot we know about this world.
And it's kind of frightening in some sense, that we we are so limited in our ability to
be collaborative, to work together, to be beyond discipline.
I love that term that you said, I usually use multidisciplinary, but I think yours is
better beyond discipline.
Because now, of course, the academics go crazy when you talk about that.
Okay, well, I got to close my course 22 or something.
MIT, you know, which is my alma mater.
I went there, I've gone back for various reasons.
And they have a lot of institutes now.
And they have as many institutes as courses.
When I went to MIT, I went back in the 50s, they had like 25 courses.
So I was chemical engineering, you know, nuclear engineering.
Now they still have the 25 courses, but they have as many institutes that are over the
top, you know,
Oh, absolutely.
And they've got a new institute.
Yeah, that, you know, the big schools have figured out, you know, that it's crud.
Now it's hard to teach is what problem based, you know, you, you, you are capability based,
you say, how can we have a hypersonic plane or something like that, then you bring in
the professors from the various departments, you know, you work the kids that way, too.
It's a big challenge for them.
Because you know, for 300 years, universities have pretty much done the same thing, including
the techies, you know, they taught disciplines.
Well, that's why I took the program I did.
Because,
Wonderful.
Yeah, you did.
You were a pioneer.
You truly were.
That's why I love to work with you.
I either she's going to get shot by the academicians or whatever, or she's going to really break
through.
Oh, the academics still hate me.
Don't worry.
Yeah, and they hate me for saying that too.
And then I go, look, I don't care.
You just got to think about it.
You know, you don't care.
I don't care about me, you know, but you got to think about the future here.
So we'll see.
Join us next time on Sometimes It Takes a Rocket Scientist for part two.
Dr. Pamela Mench's interview with Dr. Bart Bargain.