November 15, 2018 • 41 mins
How did DARPA navigate the choppy political waters in the wake of the Vietnam War and the rise of the counterculture movement? From a re-branding to a new focus on stealth technology, we look at DARPA's work in the 1970s.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer and
I love all things tech. And this is our fourth
episode about DARPA, And after this episode I will switch
to some other topics for a while. But DARPA's history
(00:26):
is incredibly complicated and it's intertwined with some of the
most important technologies we interact with today, So we will
revisit this topic in the future. Will come back and
continue the story of DARPA. But I did not want
to turn tech stuff into DARPA stuff, So after this one,
I figure we'll move on to something else and maybe
(00:47):
in a few weeks we'll pick up where we left
off today. In our last episode, we covered a lot
more of the technology that was developed as part of
the efforts in the Vietnam War, and I guess now
it's a good time to remind every in the DARPA,
which back in the sixties was known by its original
name ARPA, was not an R and D facility itself,
(01:07):
not truly. It was more of an agency that would
award contracts to other organizations such as think tanks, universities,
defense contractors, and stuff like that. ARPA slash DARPA would
fund the work and they would also set the expectations,
the guidelines, you know what it was that they were
hoping to get out of it. But the actual science
(01:29):
and development was going on throughout the United States and
all these different facilities, and these projects were frequently top
top top secret, meaning the people who worked on them
would keep it quiet even from their co workers. So
only people at the top of DARPA really tended to
know all about the bits and pieces, and sometimes even
the director wasn't fully aware of everything that was going on.
(01:50):
That's how classified some of these projects were. In nineteen
sixty nine, while several ARPA research projects were all tied
up in the Vietnam War, a group of computer networking
specialists would initiate the original Arpanet Connections. ARPANETT was the
R and D project to create a means for different
computers to send data back and forth between each other,
(02:14):
even if those computers relied upon different computer languages, and
even if they were separated by many many miles from
one another. Part of this required the design and production
of a brand new technology a router. ARPA had contracted
the company BBN Technologies to build the first routers back
in nineteen sixty eight, and then it took a year.
(02:37):
But on October twenty, nineteen sixty nine, computers at the
Stanford Research Institute, at the University of California and Santa
Barbara and at the University of Utah would connect through
these routers. The first message sent across this three node
network was low l O. This was actually Christopher Lines
(03:00):
attempt to log in l O g I N to
the s r I computer remotely, but the s r
I computer crashed in mid message, and so low is
all we got. Also, how typical is it that the
server goes down just when you have something important to
send to it? It dates all the way back to
the beginning of the ARPA net. But more seriously, this
(03:24):
connection showed that remote computers would be able to send
data back and forth using network communication standards and also
relying upon technologies like packet switching that involves dividing data
such as the data that represents a file, into smaller packets,
and each packet has information about where the data is from,
(03:44):
where it's going, and how it fits into the overall
collection of information so that you can um when I
say you, so that a computer can reconstruct the file.
These ideas we get fleshed out over the next several years.
An important moment would happen to night teen seventy four
when vent Surf and Bob con would publish a protocol
for Packet Network Interconnection, which laid out the principles behind TCP.
(04:09):
But I've done full episodes about ur PONET, so for
this episode, we'll just remind you that that was something
that was happening at this time, and will also point
out some of the big moments as they tie back
into our PA. So the main purpose of our Bonette,
by the way, that was just to create those methodologies
for computer networks. But one of the applications, perhaps one
(04:30):
of the benefits that ar Bo was really interested in,
was the idea that by creating distributed networks of computers,
the US could maintain some communications and command structures in
the event of a nuclear strike. So it's kind of scary,
but it's also really interesting when you think of it
from a communication standpoint. If you have a concentrated computer center,
(04:54):
let's say that you've got a known defense computer at
a university, Well, that is a potential target. If your
adversary knows that there's a computer at that location and
they know that it's of critical importance, they may target it.
And if they take it down, then you lose it,
and that is another problem for you to have to handle.
(05:17):
But if you create a means for computers to work
together across a big network and it spreads all over
the country, you have distributed your computing power significantly. And
even if a strike were to take down part of
that network, because the nature of the network itself, the
rest of it may continue to operate without the section
(05:39):
that has been taken out, which means you still have
some of your communications and control systems in place. So
it was looked at as a defense measure as well,
not just a means of having computers be able to
communicate with one another, but it was an added benefit.
Also in nineteen sixty nine, are PA and the U.
S Army with Bell Labs and the Williams Research Corporation
(06:03):
to develop the w R nineteen turbo fan engine. This
engine acts as the power plant for many different cruise missiles.
And I actually had to look this up because I
was not familiar with the term power plant when it
comes to things like missiles and jets and airplanes. I
think a power plant as a place that is used
(06:25):
to generate electricity. But power plant in this context is
an apparatus that provides power for device. It's not a
big surprise. And so the power in this particular scenario
is the power to fly through the air. So not
that mysterious and just threw me for a loop the
first time I saw it, because despite the fact that
I've been doing this for ten years, that I'm forty
(06:45):
three years old, I don't think I've ever actually encountered
that phrasing before. Meanwhile, while this turbo fan is in development,
while ar Panetta is coming online, ARPO was also funding
advancements in underwater propulsion systems. So not just this turbo
fan for going through the air, they were also looking
at underwater systems. The U. S. Navy had already funded
(07:07):
work out of the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State
for a system that was called the Stored Chemical Energy
Propulsion System or SKEPS s c e p S. This
was used to power torpedoes. ARPA would fund subsequent research
to increase the operation duration for those systems to have
them be long endurance systems in other words, and these
(07:30):
were systems that were relying upon thermal chemical reactions, so
you would have them burned through what was essentially fuel.
So they had to come up with new ways to
replenish that. The result of this was an improvement over
the old technology, and it would be incorporated in the
design of the m K fifty torpedo. In anti war
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sentiment was on the rise in the United States. The
Vietnam War conflict had been dragging on for were quite
some time, and the news was just devastating out of Vietnam.
For one thing, via the Vietnam War was one of
the first real conflicts where reporters on the ground were
able to send back footage and real stories of what
(08:17):
was going on, and it was not These were not
positive stories. One place where this anti war sentiment really
became apparent was at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne.
There an enormous computer, the fastest in the world at
that time, was the bull's eye of this target. The
computer was called the ILIAC four I L L I
(08:42):
A C four. Professor Daniel L. Slotnick who had called
John von Neumann, a mentor he had studied under. Von
Neuman was the Arbors scientist in charge of the Iliac
four project, and his goal was to get the ILIAC
four up to being able to process a billion instructs
per second. It was running calculations related to ballistic missiles
(09:05):
as well as the possibility of using weather modification for
defense top secret stuff in other words, because it was
a Department of Defense computer running at this university. And
in early nineteen seventy a student reporter was able to
attend a meeting where they talked about how this computer's
time was being allocated, and in that story that the
(09:26):
student reporter published, the reporter revealed that one of the
things the computer was being used to do was related
to nuclear weapons. Slot Nick was caught between anti war
protesters and the Department of Defense. He managed to anger
both sides at the same time when he said he
took on this project in order to be able to
(09:48):
build the computer. He wanted to have this computer capable
of running a billion operations per second, and in order
to do that he was going to need millions of dollars,
and the Department of Defense offered that operat tunity. He
said that if the Red Cross had done the same,
he would have taken the money from the Red Cross
and had nothing to do with the Department of Defense.
This had the benefit of taking off both the anti
(10:11):
war protesters and the Department of Defense. Nobody was happy
about this. Tensions continued to grow, and there were more
than a few violent incidents on and around the University
of Illinois campus in the months following this news report.
So in June of that year, the university reported to
ARPA that the university was no longer going to be
(10:33):
able to keep this computer safe. The ILIAC four was
in danger if it stayed on campus, and so ARPA
chose to move the computer, which by the way, was huge.
I mean it was several feet long, several feet wide,
weight an enormous amounts, So moving it was not a
an easy option. In fact, just to plug in the
(10:53):
power supply you would have to have a forklift. So
this was not an easy thing to move. But they
did relocate it. They moved did all the way out
to California to NASA's Institute for Advanced Computation at the
AIMS Research Center. Now, following this, while you have this
anti war sentiment growing, you have these these violent protests happening.
Senator Mike Mansfield would introduce a bill that would limit
(11:17):
ARPA's projects to those that had a quote specific military
function end quote. ARPA would end up having trouble getting
budget for speculative or bleeding edge research. They were mostly
trying to look into ways of pushing the bleeding edge
of technology out much further than anyone else. In fact,
(11:40):
the whole goal of ARPA or DARPA as it would
later be known, was to make certain that the United
States would never be left behind again, that another spot
Nick type event would never happen to the US, that
the US would always be on the forefront of that technology,
which would mean having to do a lot of exploratory
research and development that you could not easily tie into
(12:05):
active military efforts because you're looking ahead to anticipate problems
that you don't have yet but you think are around
the corner. So this was a real blow to the agency.
In addition, the Secretary of Defense would order ARPA to
be removed from the Pentagon, so the agency's new office
(12:25):
would be almost three miles away in Arlington, Virginia, and
that would mean that you would no longer have that
very quick, immediate access to Pentagon officials. You weren't working
side by side with them anymore. No one at ARPA,
not even the director, was really sure if the agency
was going to be around much longer or not. There
was a serious worry that the agency might just fizzle
(12:48):
out without a formal conclusion. But the agency wasn't officially
shut down, and so it would continue to fund R
and D work in various projects. I'll explain a little
bit more in just a second, but first let's take
a quick break to thank our sponsor. ARFA was also
(13:13):
funding work to develop low weight mirrors made out of
beryllium for use, and stuff like infrared telescopes and ballistic
missile defense systems and weapons guidance systems ended up being
useful for lots of stuff, especially in space. I mean anytime,
and I'll mention this again towards the end of this episode,
anytime you can reduce the amount of weight of the
(13:34):
components you're sending up into space, you want to do
it because weight essentially equates money. The heavier your payload
is to get into space, the more expensive it's going
to be to get up there. So this was an
important development not just for these military guidance systems and
defense systems, but for space faring stuff overall. Are but
(13:59):
also funded development of technologies that would be incorporated into
a new generation of detection equipment that could pick up
Soviet submarine movements. Uh. The project was considered one of
the agency's biggest successes, with the resulting technology being deployed
in the early nineteen eighties. So again you see how
far ahead the agency is from the production of technology.
(14:22):
You know, it's several years out from where they're doing
the research and development. They do the r and D
work in the early seventies, it's not really ready to
be rolled out in an application until the nineteen eighties.
But that was again are PA's argument. They said, we
are necessary to be able to work on these problems
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and anticipate these things so that we're ready to go
within a decade or so. But if we're not doing that,
if we're being reactionary instead of proactive, we're going to
be behind the game. John Lehman, who was Secretary of
the Navy in nineteen would end up saying that because
of these submarine sensors, if a war were to ever
(15:03):
break out between the United States and the Soviet Union,
those sensors would give him the capability to attack all
Soviet subs that were in deployment within the first five
minutes of that war. So it was considered to be
an incredibly successful technology. It's also indicative of a lot
of DARPA's early work, which focused largely on developing sensor
(15:23):
technology for all sorts of stuff seismic sensors, acoustic sensors,
radioactive isotope sensors, etcetera. So there's also no getting around
the fact that most of the technologies I've talked about
in these episodes are meant either to defend against or attack,
or to make attacks more effective. They're all supposed to
(15:44):
be related to military stuff, after all, But this next
bit is sort of a relief from that. In the
early nineteen seventies, are PA funded research into what was
called glassy carbon. This was a foamy sort of stuff
made from pure carbon, and the foam had some really
interesting features. It was strong, it didn't weigh very much,
(16:05):
it was chemically inert, and while the original idea was
that the stuff might be really important for numerous electrochemical applications.
One unexpected benefit was that it became a strong candidate
for material to use in surgical implants like heart valves,
and so it was. And so this particular ARPA project
would fund work on a technology that would go on
(16:26):
to save countless lives, and I think that's pretty cool.
It's also a good reminder that while some of this
technology was initially intended specifically for a military purpose or
to potentially go into military applications, they often would have
much wider applications than just military ones. In nineteen two,
(16:47):
are PAS Materials Research Projects developed rare earth permanent magnets
capable of operating That means is, you know, maintaining their
magnetism across a range of temperatures that had been identified
as being military relevant. And it's a pretty big range.
So on the low end is minus fifty five degrees
celsius or minus sixty seven fahrenheit. On the hot end
(17:10):
of the scale, it's a hundred twenty five degrees celsius,
which is two hundred fifty seven degrees fahrenheit. Now, typically
heating a magnet will reduce its strength of its magnetic field,
and cooling a magnet down will increase a permanent magnets
magnetic field. So why is that Well, from a very
basic level, a magnet's molecules are largely aligned with one another.
(17:32):
They're more or less all pointing in the same direction
within the material. So you've got all these molecules that
are lined up in parallel, and their north poles are
all pointing in one direction, their south poles are all
pointing in the other direction. Heating a magnet up causes
molecules to move around. Heating stuff up causes molecular movement,
and the more the molecules move around, the more that
(17:54):
alignment is compromised. So if you heat up a magnet
a bit, it starts to lose its magnetic properties. If
you heat it up enough to a point that's called
the Curie point, named after Madam Curry, they will no
longer be magnetic at all. You will have demagnetized your
magnet by heating it up to this point. It's where
(18:14):
the molecules will be out of alignment and they will
not realign. To do that, though, you'd have to heat
the material a pretty darn hot. The Cury point is
typically very very very hot for most materials, so for example,
iron that curi point is like seven seventy degrees celsius.
It's one thousand, four hundred seventeen degrees fahrenheit. So this
(18:38):
would mean that it be very rare that you would
ever encounter those kind of situations. The only way you
would do it is if you were doing it on purpose. Typically,
this work was really to make sure that the magnets
were going to operate according to expectations under hot and
cold conditions. Also in nineteen two, ARPA officially became DARPA,
(18:58):
or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it would
stick with that name until nine. In three it would
drop the D and become ARPA again for three years,
and then in nine will become DARPA again. But I
figure we're gonna have a while before we get to
the nineties, so we'll talk about that when we get there.
(19:21):
Another DARPA funded innovation in the early nineteen seventies was
the development of gallium arsenide as a semiconductor material. So
before the semiconductor electronics relied on these really large component
parts like vacuum tubes, which meant your basic computer would
take up an enormous amount of space. Several researchers developed
(19:41):
semiconductor technologies all the way through the nineteen forties, but
it would take a while for the semiconductor transistor to
become practical. The properties of gallium arsenide allowed it to
host faster transistors running on more power than you could
put on a silicon transistor. Technology would find its way
into all sorts of applications, though the military was mostly
(20:04):
concerned with its use on GPS kits and precision guided
munitions and other defensive systems. One last bit about the
Vietnam War and DARPA, because we're getting to the point
where America was getting ready to withdraw from Vietnam. The
war became increasingly unpopular as it stretched on, and for
(20:24):
one thing, in the US, it was never really a
formal war. The US had started out trying to supply
aid in the form of technology and training to the
South Vietnamese government and military, and this was all in
an effort to stop the growth of communism without getting
directly involved. That was the goal, was to make sure
that the South Vietnamese forces were capable of handling this
(20:50):
without the US having to get directly involved. But obviously
that did not pan out. Every year since nineteen fifty
nine had seen an increase in the number of US
troops sent to the region. In nineteen seventy one, a
former Rand Corporation analyst named Daniel Ellsberg would leak a
collection of documents that collectively were called the Pentagon Papers
(21:11):
to The New York Times. Those documents contained information about
the US is secret involvement with Vietnam for more than
a decade. This was actually a detailed report that mc
namara had asked the Rand Corporation to put together as
it was going on, sort of an encyclopedia of the
Vietnam War. And the problem was that at this point
(21:35):
this analyst leaked the whole thing to The New York Times,
and it included details on the various ARPA projects that
had happened in that time, and the involvement of the
super elitist group of scientists called the Jason's and the
growing anti war movement was really gaining momentum in the
United States, and many people were outraged not just about
(21:57):
the war, but also about these revelations of how the
US public had been deceived over the years, how the
government had been purposefully misleading the US population, that is,
you know, at least supposed to be represented by this government.
And so it bred this this distrust in the government,
(22:18):
saying you have been doing all the secret stuff, telling
us it's one thing when it's really another. The anti
war sentiment put a lot of pressure on all parties involved.
Eventually it led to ARPA's director, who was a Dr.
Steve J. Lucasik, the seventh director of ARPA at that point,
to sever the ties with the Jason's ARPA was seen
(22:39):
as the R and D tip on the point of
the military industrial complex SPEAR, and since the efforts in
Vietnam didn't prevent the North Vietnamese forces from taking Saigon,
many were beginning to question the usefulness of such an
agency in the first place. The experience of Vietnam had
an enormous effect on the American psyche. The majority of
(23:00):
Americans felt the war was unethical and a political mistake,
and that it led to the deaths of thousands of Americans,
not to mention millions of others. And it taunt Americans
that the use of force and superior technology would not
necessarily win out over philosophies and ideology. It wasn't realistic
to say because we are technologically superior, We're definitely going
(23:23):
to win. Now, all of this is to say that
it would make the post Vietnam War era for DARPA
really challenging. Apart from the name change, which was again
to indicate that from this point forward, the agency was
only going to pursue projects that met a specific military need.
All projects related to the Vietnam War were to stop.
(23:43):
Project Agile was called an enormous failure, that all the
attempts to bring research and technology to stop insurgents had
been ineffective at best and counter productive at worst. Several
previous ARPA directors who oversaw Project Agile throughout the years
would admit that their efforts were misguided and ineffective. DARBA
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established a new office called Tactical Technology. This office carried
out much of the top secret R and D work
around sensors, improving the technologies that had been part of
the failed electric fence project, as well as more successful
projects like VILA and the submarine sensors. And then there
was the move to research technologies that can mask aircraft
(24:26):
from radar systems. New advanced air defense missile systems were
making it increasingly dangerous to fly missions in combat theaters.
DARPA would tackle this problem by funding research into ways
that an aircraft might foil radar systems, either by absorbing
radar waves so that nothing bounces back, or by reflecting
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radar waves off into other directions so that they don't
return to their radar stations, or both. These projects would
evolve into have Blue, the first practical stealth combat aircraft.
This was a proof of concept vehicle the had's first
test flight in nineteen seventy seven, and there's an interesting
behind the scenes story that really shows how secretive all
(25:09):
this stuff was. So the CIA had previously been working
with Lockheed to develop stealth technology that would culminate with
an aircraft called the A twelve Ox cart Plane. I
talked about it in an episode about stealth aircraft. But
the A twelve was so top secret that even the
director of DARPA, who was George Hallmeyer at this time,
(25:33):
he hadn't even heard about it. So when DARPA began
to look for possible contractors to work on stealth technology,
they did not initially consider Lockeed. They weren't They didn't
know that Lockeed had been working on this stuff. They
originally only reached out to McDonald Douglas and to Northrop.
When Lockeed executives found out, they petitioned the CIA to
(25:55):
let them tell DARPA about the stealth technology that the
Super Secrets Gunkworks division had been doing in order to
bid on this contract. The CIA would allow Locked to
tell hal Meyer about the twelve, which later would evolve
into the SR seventy one reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force,
and Lockeed would win this contract. I'll have more to
(26:17):
say about stealth technology and some of the other tech
that DARBA worked on towards the end of the seventies
in just a moment, but first let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. The original design for what
would become Have Blue would later evolve into the F
(26:40):
one seventeen stealth fighter. The original design was nicknamed the
Hopeless Diamond. The sketch was of an aircraft that vaguely
resembled the Hope Diamond and had lots of facets and
odd angles. No one was really sure if it would
be able to fly. The weird angles were part of
the stealth technology. It was all on effort to redirect
(27:02):
those incoming radar signals so that they would not return
to the listing stations. They would bounce off into some
other directions, kind of like using a mirror to direct
a ray of light and you just tilt the mirror
a different direction and the light goes a different way.
By redirecting the radar signals, it would seem to the
radar station that there was nothing in that region of
the sky. That was the whole idea. Much of the
(27:24):
work on the stealth technology took place on the most
famous secret base of all time, which of course is
Area fifty one or the Groom Lake Facility. I've talked
about this base numerous times in this podcast as well.
The Air Force would take over the program in the
late nineteen seventies and conduct flight tests all over the
Tonopah Test Range, which was seventy miles northwest of Area
(27:47):
fifty one. Some people would just call that Area fifty two.
And another big project was in updating the old transit
navigation system. It was a satellite based navigation system that
u ARPA had been involved with in the early sixties.
This effort was to replace that with a more robust
(28:08):
satellite system. In nineteen seventy three, as America was withdrawing
from Vietnam, the Pentagon ordered a joint program for a
single navigation system that all the branches of the military
would be able to use, because at this point, these
various military branches had all been working on their own
systems which were not compatible with one another, and eventually
(28:30):
um the government said, this doesn't make sense. We should
have a more unified approach. So this new program was
called nav Star, and DARPA helped fund the development of
this program, which by was finally ready for full deployment,
and it consisted of twenty four satellites with atomic clocks,
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which was necessary for synchronization, and they were launched into
orbit to give global navigation coverage. This information could be
used not just to navigate people around the world, but
also for guided weapons systems. As part of the technology,
designers included what they called an offset feature. It was
it was known as selective availability, and it meant that
(29:14):
if you didn't have the right kind of receiver to
descramble this information and get a readout, you would actually
get a result that would be off by several hundred feet,
which would limit the chances of someone unauthorized making use
of the system, and it would also keep the GPS
network impractical for commercial use. That is until President Bill
Clinton would end the era of selective availability and allow
(29:37):
civilian systems to access information with essentially the same precision
as military systems, and at that point GPS receivers were
accurate enough to be used for things like navigation and cars,
because before you would be you know, you would have
like a precision of down two around a few hundred feet.
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That's not very useful when you're trying to look for
return anyway. During Vietnam, DARPA had funded a few drone
programs as well. These were very primitive drones compared to
what we have today, but it was the beginning of
serious work in unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance and for weaponization.
They were code named Prairie and Collare. Both were remotely
(30:20):
piloted vehicles or RPVs, and both used lawnmower motors and
could carry a payload of about twenty eight pounds or
twelve point seven kilograms. These would serve as prototypes for
work in the field, which DARPA would end up handing
over to the Armed Forces in nineteen seventy seven, DARPA
would fund another project for an unmanned aerial vehicle called
(30:43):
Amber that was supposed to be a long endurance u
a V that would get support from the Navy. As
the project was proving promising, but in the late nineteen eighties,
Congress would create a new Joint Program Office to continue
research and development for unmanned aerial vehicles and DARPA was
effectively removed from that process. DARPA would move on to
(31:05):
pursue a new project called Assault Breaker, which had the
goal of bringing together many different disparate technologies in an
effort to make them work together in a system of systems.
This idea of we have all these pieces out there
and they're all effective, but it would be better if
we could actually make a cohesive approach to this. So
(31:27):
the goal was to create a means in which military
commanders would have an enormous amount of information at their
disposal and the capability of launching an attack on a target,
even if that target were well behind enemy lines. This
would require bringing together all of these different technologies that
DARPA had played a part in making a reality. Soviet
Union spies learned about this program, Assault Breaker, and they
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reported back to their superiors in Moscow, and as eventually,
military personnel in the Soviet Union wrote up a report
and published it in a journal called Military Thought. It's
actually a classified journal. Only a few high ranking officials
really had access to it. Well, high ranking Soviet officials
and a few U. S. Spies, because, as we know,
(32:12):
everyone is spying on everyone else all the time, always.
So when US officials learned that the Soviet government was
worried that the US was building up a program that
would give America this incredible advantage in both gathering intelligence
and acting upon it, spirits started to run high in
the US because if your enemy is scared, that's good
(32:33):
news for you. I guess. One cool project that started
independently from Darba was one that would eventually be called simnet.
So there was an Air Force pilot named Jack Thorpe
who was thinking about the possibility of networked flight simulators
for the purposes of training pilots, you know, combat training
(32:55):
without actually having to go up in a real jet.
And he had experienced this on a small scale ld.
This was not something he just came up with on
his own. He had already had sort of this experience
in a system that was at the Flying Training Division
of Williams Air Force Base, and that system would allow
two pilots to simulate flying emission together. The simulator was
(33:15):
complete with hydraulic motion system, so it move you as
you're piloting the simulated aircraft. But again it was just
a pair of these simulators that worked together. Thorpe wondered
if perhaps it would be possible to build out a
much larger system with multiple UH simulators all connected to
each other to allow for more complex training. Thorpe wrote
(33:36):
up a paper titled Future Views Aircrew Training nineteen eighty
through two thousand. This was in n when he wrote this,
and he pitched his ideas to top Brass, but they
didn't take it very seriously. To be fair to them,
the tech that Thorpe was proposing was incredibly sophisticated for
(33:56):
the time, and also not many people really knew that
much about the progress that ARPA net had been making
in networking different computer systems together, so no one was
really sure how feasible this was. Thorpe would go on
doing his career and then he would go to the
Naval War College to further his education, and after getting
out of that he was assigned sort of on loan
(34:19):
by the Air Force to DARPA. While he was at DARPA,
his boss asked him, hey, gun, any interesting ideas, you know,
beyond what you're working on. So Thorpe shared his vision
of these networked simulators, and his boss loved this idea
and told Thorpe that you should tell this to Larry Lynn,
who was then the director of DARPA. Larry Lynn liked
(34:40):
it a lot too, and so yes, Thorpe, how much
money do you think it would cost to do this project?
And Thorpe said seventeen million dollars and Lynn said, okay, doky.
So the program began and it became known as Simulator
Networking or sim net. DARPA would contract with delt A
Graphics Incorporated, Perceptronics Incorporated, and bb IN Incorporated to help
(35:05):
build out the system, and they would subcontract with other
companies to build all these simulators. And they weren't just
aircraft simulators. They built tank simulators and other stuff too,
and they networked them all together. The advantages of these
simulators over real world training were numerous. Real world combat
training is obviously very dangerous for some scenarios such as
(35:28):
let's say you want to operate your aircraft, but you
also want to jam the sensors on that aircraft. Not
only is that very dangerous because you're taking away some
of the information that the pilots are relying upon, it's
also potentially problematic because depending on where you're flying these
these training missions, using that jamming technology can affect other
(35:50):
stuff like commercial flights, or maybe the the airspace of allies,
or maybe people who aren't your allies. It could be
really really touchy. But if you simulate it, you can
do pretty much any scenario that the computer is capable
of running. So also, because the systems were networked in theory,
you could have people in different parts of the world
(36:12):
all training together. You didn't have to get them all
in the same place at the same time, though, you
would have to figure out something about lag and latency
for these systems. Symnet in a way was a precursor
to online games that millions of gamers play these days,
like M M O RPGs. They can kind of trace,
uh what not necessarily trace their history back. But symnet
(36:35):
was definitely a precursor to that kind of stuff. There
are many more technologies the DARPA helped fund In the
nineteen seventies, there were xemer lasers. These were used in
communications platforms between aircraft and submerged submarines. They needed to
develop special lasers in the short wave range of lasers.
The longer wavelengths didn't have good penetration in the water,
(36:58):
so you couldn't really use them to communicate with a submarine.
But there was this need to communicate with submarines because
at that point, really the only way a submarine could
communicate with the surface is if the submarine itself surfaced,
and obviously that puts the submarine in a vulnerable position.
Being able to use these short wave lasers and have
(37:19):
them penetrate the water reach the submarine and have the
submarine be able to respond opened up communication in ways
that weren't possible before. DARPA also contributed some of the
components for the Hubble Space Telescope. The agency would design
and help build two antenna booms for the satellite telescope
in the late nineteen seventies and early nineties. DARBA pioneered
(37:42):
the development of a special graphite and aluminum material that
would allow the booms to not just conduct radio frequencies
but also double as structural supports. So these structural supports
that made made the overall telescope lighter. The material was lighter,
it removes some of the need for some extra infrastructure.
And again, if you make your payload lighter to send
(38:05):
off into space, you bring the price down. So weight
is money, So it was a cost saving feature. It
took the better part of a decade for DARPA to
recover in the wake of the Vietnam War. The agency
changed a lot in the nineteen seventies. And we're gonna
leave off for now. We're gonna say goodbye to DARPA
(38:26):
for the time being, but I will come back to
revisit the agency and the projects that funded over the
following decades in future episodes. So we'll talk about things
like star wars and autonomous cars and spying on World
of Warcraft players and more, because DARPA played a role
in all of that kind of stuff. It's a fascinating story.
(38:47):
And again, because of the work that DARPA has helped fund,
we have access to some pretty incredible technologies that you know,
rolled out a few years later based on that early work.
So it's definitely benefited us in many, many ways. The
agency has also created stuff that's been at best controversial
(39:10):
and it worst incredibly incredibly harmful, like Agent Orange is
the one to point to easily as being a truly
terrible thing. So you take the good, you take the bad,
you take them both, and there you have DARPA. I
guess we will revisit this in the future, but in
the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions for topics
(39:33):
you would like me to cover on tech Stuff, some
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(39:56):
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check that out and I'll talk to you again really
soon for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it has stuff works dot Com. Eight
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer and
I love all things tech. And this is our fourth
episode about DARPA, And after this episode I will switch
to some other topics for a while. But DARPA's history
(00:26):
is incredibly complicated and it's intertwined with some of the
most important technologies we interact with today, So we will
revisit this topic in the future. Will come back and
continue the story of DARPA. But I did not want
to turn tech stuff into DARPA stuff, So after this one,
I figure we'll move on to something else and maybe
(00:47):
in a few weeks we'll pick up where we left
off today. In our last episode, we covered a lot
more of the technology that was developed as part of
the efforts in the Vietnam War, and I guess now
it's a good time to remind every in the DARPA,
which back in the sixties was known by its original
name ARPA, was not an R and D facility itself,
(01:07):
not truly. It was more of an agency that would
award contracts to other organizations such as think tanks, universities,
defense contractors, and stuff like that. ARPA slash DARPA would
fund the work and they would also set the expectations,
the guidelines, you know what it was that they were
hoping to get out of it. But the actual science
(01:29):
and development was going on throughout the United States and
all these different facilities, and these projects were frequently top
top top secret, meaning the people who worked on them
would keep it quiet even from their co workers. So
only people at the top of DARPA really tended to
know all about the bits and pieces, and sometimes even
the director wasn't fully aware of everything that was going on.
(01:50):
That's how classified some of these projects were. In nineteen
sixty nine, while several ARPA research projects were all tied
up in the Vietnam War, a group of computer networking
specialists would initiate the original Arpanet Connections. ARPANETT was the
R and D project to create a means for different
computers to send data back and forth between each other,
(02:14):
even if those computers relied upon different computer languages, and
even if they were separated by many many miles from
one another. Part of this required the design and production
of a brand new technology a router. ARPA had contracted
the company BBN Technologies to build the first routers back
in nineteen sixty eight, and then it took a year.
(02:37):
But on October twenty, nineteen sixty nine, computers at the
Stanford Research Institute, at the University of California and Santa
Barbara and at the University of Utah would connect through
these routers. The first message sent across this three node
network was low l O. This was actually Christopher Lines
(03:00):
attempt to log in l O g I N to
the s r I computer remotely, but the s r
I computer crashed in mid message, and so low is
all we got. Also, how typical is it that the
server goes down just when you have something important to
send to it? It dates all the way back to
the beginning of the ARPA net. But more seriously, this
(03:24):
connection showed that remote computers would be able to send
data back and forth using network communication standards and also
relying upon technologies like packet switching that involves dividing data
such as the data that represents a file, into smaller packets,
and each packet has information about where the data is from,
(03:44):
where it's going, and how it fits into the overall
collection of information so that you can um when I
say you, so that a computer can reconstruct the file.
These ideas we get fleshed out over the next several years.
An important moment would happen to night teen seventy four
when vent Surf and Bob con would publish a protocol
for Packet Network Interconnection, which laid out the principles behind TCP.
(04:09):
But I've done full episodes about ur PONET, so for
this episode, we'll just remind you that that was something
that was happening at this time, and will also point
out some of the big moments as they tie back
into our PA. So the main purpose of our Bonette,
by the way, that was just to create those methodologies
for computer networks. But one of the applications, perhaps one
(04:30):
of the benefits that ar Bo was really interested in,
was the idea that by creating distributed networks of computers,
the US could maintain some communications and command structures in
the event of a nuclear strike. So it's kind of scary,
but it's also really interesting when you think of it
from a communication standpoint. If you have a concentrated computer center,
(04:54):
let's say that you've got a known defense computer at
a university, Well, that is a potential target. If your
adversary knows that there's a computer at that location and
they know that it's of critical importance, they may target it.
And if they take it down, then you lose it,
and that is another problem for you to have to handle.
(05:17):
But if you create a means for computers to work
together across a big network and it spreads all over
the country, you have distributed your computing power significantly. And
even if a strike were to take down part of
that network, because the nature of the network itself, the
rest of it may continue to operate without the section
(05:39):
that has been taken out, which means you still have
some of your communications and control systems in place. So
it was looked at as a defense measure as well,
not just a means of having computers be able to
communicate with one another, but it was an added benefit.
Also in nineteen sixty nine, are PA and the U.
S Army with Bell Labs and the Williams Research Corporation
(06:03):
to develop the w R nineteen turbo fan engine. This
engine acts as the power plant for many different cruise missiles.
And I actually had to look this up because I
was not familiar with the term power plant when it
comes to things like missiles and jets and airplanes. I
think a power plant as a place that is used
(06:25):
to generate electricity. But power plant in this context is
an apparatus that provides power for device. It's not a
big surprise. And so the power in this particular scenario
is the power to fly through the air. So not
that mysterious and just threw me for a loop the
first time I saw it, because despite the fact that
I've been doing this for ten years, that I'm forty
(06:45):
three years old, I don't think I've ever actually encountered
that phrasing before. Meanwhile, while this turbo fan is in development,
while ar Panetta is coming online, ARPO was also funding
advancements in underwater propulsion systems. So not just this turbo
fan for going through the air, they were also looking
at underwater systems. The U. S. Navy had already funded
(07:07):
work out of the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State
for a system that was called the Stored Chemical Energy
Propulsion System or SKEPS s c e p S. This
was used to power torpedoes. ARPA would fund subsequent research
to increase the operation duration for those systems to have
them be long endurance systems in other words, and these
(07:30):
were systems that were relying upon thermal chemical reactions, so
you would have them burned through what was essentially fuel.
So they had to come up with new ways to
replenish that. The result of this was an improvement over
the old technology, and it would be incorporated in the
design of the m K fifty torpedo. In anti war
(07:53):
sentiment was on the rise in the United States. The
Vietnam War conflict had been dragging on for were quite
some time, and the news was just devastating out of Vietnam.
For one thing, via the Vietnam War was one of
the first real conflicts where reporters on the ground were
able to send back footage and real stories of what
(08:17):
was going on, and it was not These were not
positive stories. One place where this anti war sentiment really
became apparent was at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne.
There an enormous computer, the fastest in the world at
that time, was the bull's eye of this target. The
computer was called the ILIAC four I L L I
(08:42):
A C four. Professor Daniel L. Slotnick who had called
John von Neumann, a mentor he had studied under. Von
Neuman was the Arbors scientist in charge of the Iliac
four project, and his goal was to get the ILIAC
four up to being able to process a billion instructs
per second. It was running calculations related to ballistic missiles
(09:05):
as well as the possibility of using weather modification for
defense top secret stuff in other words, because it was
a Department of Defense computer running at this university. And
in early nineteen seventy a student reporter was able to
attend a meeting where they talked about how this computer's
time was being allocated, and in that story that the
(09:26):
student reporter published, the reporter revealed that one of the
things the computer was being used to do was related
to nuclear weapons. Slot Nick was caught between anti war
protesters and the Department of Defense. He managed to anger
both sides at the same time when he said he
took on this project in order to be able to
(09:48):
build the computer. He wanted to have this computer capable
of running a billion operations per second, and in order
to do that he was going to need millions of dollars,
and the Department of Defense offered that operat tunity. He
said that if the Red Cross had done the same,
he would have taken the money from the Red Cross
and had nothing to do with the Department of Defense.
This had the benefit of taking off both the anti
(10:11):
war protesters and the Department of Defense. Nobody was happy
about this. Tensions continued to grow, and there were more
than a few violent incidents on and around the University
of Illinois campus in the months following this news report.
So in June of that year, the university reported to
ARPA that the university was no longer going to be
(10:33):
able to keep this computer safe. The ILIAC four was
in danger if it stayed on campus, and so ARPA
chose to move the computer, which by the way, was huge.
I mean it was several feet long, several feet wide,
weight an enormous amounts, So moving it was not a
an easy option. In fact, just to plug in the
(10:53):
power supply you would have to have a forklift. So
this was not an easy thing to move. But they
did relocate it. They moved did all the way out
to California to NASA's Institute for Advanced Computation at the
AIMS Research Center. Now, following this, while you have this
anti war sentiment growing, you have these these violent protests happening.
Senator Mike Mansfield would introduce a bill that would limit
(11:17):
ARPA's projects to those that had a quote specific military
function end quote. ARPA would end up having trouble getting
budget for speculative or bleeding edge research. They were mostly
trying to look into ways of pushing the bleeding edge
of technology out much further than anyone else. In fact,
(11:40):
the whole goal of ARPA or DARPA as it would
later be known, was to make certain that the United
States would never be left behind again, that another spot
Nick type event would never happen to the US, that
the US would always be on the forefront of that technology,
which would mean having to do a lot of exploratory
research and development that you could not easily tie into
(12:05):
active military efforts because you're looking ahead to anticipate problems
that you don't have yet but you think are around
the corner. So this was a real blow to the agency.
In addition, the Secretary of Defense would order ARPA to
be removed from the Pentagon, so the agency's new office
(12:25):
would be almost three miles away in Arlington, Virginia, and
that would mean that you would no longer have that
very quick, immediate access to Pentagon officials. You weren't working
side by side with them anymore. No one at ARPA,
not even the director, was really sure if the agency
was going to be around much longer or not. There
was a serious worry that the agency might just fizzle
(12:48):
out without a formal conclusion. But the agency wasn't officially
shut down, and so it would continue to fund R
and D work in various projects. I'll explain a little
bit more in just a second, but first let's take
a quick break to thank our sponsor. ARFA was also
(13:13):
funding work to develop low weight mirrors made out of
beryllium for use, and stuff like infrared telescopes and ballistic
missile defense systems and weapons guidance systems ended up being
useful for lots of stuff, especially in space. I mean anytime,
and I'll mention this again towards the end of this episode,
anytime you can reduce the amount of weight of the
(13:34):
components you're sending up into space, you want to do
it because weight essentially equates money. The heavier your payload
is to get into space, the more expensive it's going
to be to get up there. So this was an
important development not just for these military guidance systems and
defense systems, but for space faring stuff overall. Are but
(13:59):
also funded development of technologies that would be incorporated into
a new generation of detection equipment that could pick up
Soviet submarine movements. Uh. The project was considered one of
the agency's biggest successes, with the resulting technology being deployed
in the early nineteen eighties. So again you see how
far ahead the agency is from the production of technology.
(14:22):
You know, it's several years out from where they're doing
the research and development. They do the r and D
work in the early seventies, it's not really ready to
be rolled out in an application until the nineteen eighties.
But that was again are PA's argument. They said, we
are necessary to be able to work on these problems
(14:42):
and anticipate these things so that we're ready to go
within a decade or so. But if we're not doing that,
if we're being reactionary instead of proactive, we're going to
be behind the game. John Lehman, who was Secretary of
the Navy in nineteen would end up saying that because
of these submarine sensors, if a war were to ever
(15:03):
break out between the United States and the Soviet Union,
those sensors would give him the capability to attack all
Soviet subs that were in deployment within the first five
minutes of that war. So it was considered to be
an incredibly successful technology. It's also indicative of a lot
of DARPA's early work, which focused largely on developing sensor
(15:23):
technology for all sorts of stuff seismic sensors, acoustic sensors,
radioactive isotope sensors, etcetera. So there's also no getting around
the fact that most of the technologies I've talked about
in these episodes are meant either to defend against or attack,
or to make attacks more effective. They're all supposed to
(15:44):
be related to military stuff, after all, But this next
bit is sort of a relief from that. In the
early nineteen seventies, are PA funded research into what was
called glassy carbon. This was a foamy sort of stuff
made from pure carbon, and the foam had some really
interesting features. It was strong, it didn't weigh very much,
(16:05):
it was chemically inert, and while the original idea was
that the stuff might be really important for numerous electrochemical applications.
One unexpected benefit was that it became a strong candidate
for material to use in surgical implants like heart valves,
and so it was. And so this particular ARPA project
would fund work on a technology that would go on
(16:26):
to save countless lives, and I think that's pretty cool.
It's also a good reminder that while some of this
technology was initially intended specifically for a military purpose or
to potentially go into military applications, they often would have
much wider applications than just military ones. In nineteen two,
(16:47):
are PAS Materials Research Projects developed rare earth permanent magnets
capable of operating That means is, you know, maintaining their
magnetism across a range of temperatures that had been identified
as being military relevant. And it's a pretty big range.
So on the low end is minus fifty five degrees
celsius or minus sixty seven fahrenheit. On the hot end
(17:10):
of the scale, it's a hundred twenty five degrees celsius,
which is two hundred fifty seven degrees fahrenheit. Now, typically
heating a magnet will reduce its strength of its magnetic field,
and cooling a magnet down will increase a permanent magnets
magnetic field. So why is that Well, from a very
basic level, a magnet's molecules are largely aligned with one another.
(17:32):
They're more or less all pointing in the same direction
within the material. So you've got all these molecules that
are lined up in parallel, and their north poles are
all pointing in one direction, their south poles are all
pointing in the other direction. Heating a magnet up causes
molecules to move around. Heating stuff up causes molecular movement,
and the more the molecules move around, the more that
(17:54):
alignment is compromised. So if you heat up a magnet
a bit, it starts to lose its magnetic properties. If
you heat it up enough to a point that's called
the Curie point, named after Madam Curry, they will no
longer be magnetic at all. You will have demagnetized your
magnet by heating it up to this point. It's where
(18:14):
the molecules will be out of alignment and they will
not realign. To do that, though, you'd have to heat
the material a pretty darn hot. The Cury point is
typically very very very hot for most materials, so for example,
iron that curi point is like seven seventy degrees celsius.
It's one thousand, four hundred seventeen degrees fahrenheit. So this
(18:38):
would mean that it be very rare that you would
ever encounter those kind of situations. The only way you
would do it is if you were doing it on purpose. Typically,
this work was really to make sure that the magnets
were going to operate according to expectations under hot and
cold conditions. Also in nineteen two, ARPA officially became DARPA,
(18:58):
or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it would
stick with that name until nine. In three it would
drop the D and become ARPA again for three years,
and then in nine will become DARPA again. But I
figure we're gonna have a while before we get to
the nineties, so we'll talk about that when we get there.
(19:21):
Another DARPA funded innovation in the early nineteen seventies was
the development of gallium arsenide as a semiconductor material. So
before the semiconductor electronics relied on these really large component
parts like vacuum tubes, which meant your basic computer would
take up an enormous amount of space. Several researchers developed
(19:41):
semiconductor technologies all the way through the nineteen forties, but
it would take a while for the semiconductor transistor to
become practical. The properties of gallium arsenide allowed it to
host faster transistors running on more power than you could
put on a silicon transistor. Technology would find its way
into all sorts of applications, though the military was mostly
(20:04):
concerned with its use on GPS kits and precision guided
munitions and other defensive systems. One last bit about the
Vietnam War and DARPA, because we're getting to the point
where America was getting ready to withdraw from Vietnam. The
war became increasingly unpopular as it stretched on, and for
(20:24):
one thing, in the US, it was never really a
formal war. The US had started out trying to supply
aid in the form of technology and training to the
South Vietnamese government and military, and this was all in
an effort to stop the growth of communism without getting
directly involved. That was the goal, was to make sure
that the South Vietnamese forces were capable of handling this
(20:50):
without the US having to get directly involved. But obviously
that did not pan out. Every year since nineteen fifty
nine had seen an increase in the number of US
troops sent to the region. In nineteen seventy one, a
former Rand Corporation analyst named Daniel Ellsberg would leak a
collection of documents that collectively were called the Pentagon Papers
(21:11):
to The New York Times. Those documents contained information about
the US is secret involvement with Vietnam for more than
a decade. This was actually a detailed report that mc
namara had asked the Rand Corporation to put together as
it was going on, sort of an encyclopedia of the
Vietnam War. And the problem was that at this point
(21:35):
this analyst leaked the whole thing to The New York Times,
and it included details on the various ARPA projects that
had happened in that time, and the involvement of the
super elitist group of scientists called the Jason's and the
growing anti war movement was really gaining momentum in the
United States, and many people were outraged not just about
(21:57):
the war, but also about these revelations of how the
US public had been deceived over the years, how the
government had been purposefully misleading the US population, that is,
you know, at least supposed to be represented by this government.
And so it bred this this distrust in the government,
(22:18):
saying you have been doing all the secret stuff, telling
us it's one thing when it's really another. The anti
war sentiment put a lot of pressure on all parties involved.
Eventually it led to ARPA's director, who was a Dr.
Steve J. Lucasik, the seventh director of ARPA at that point,
to sever the ties with the Jason's ARPA was seen
(22:39):
as the R and D tip on the point of
the military industrial complex SPEAR, and since the efforts in
Vietnam didn't prevent the North Vietnamese forces from taking Saigon,
many were beginning to question the usefulness of such an
agency in the first place. The experience of Vietnam had
an enormous effect on the American psyche. The majority of
(23:00):
Americans felt the war was unethical and a political mistake,
and that it led to the deaths of thousands of Americans,
not to mention millions of others. And it taunt Americans
that the use of force and superior technology would not
necessarily win out over philosophies and ideology. It wasn't realistic
to say because we are technologically superior, We're definitely going
(23:23):
to win. Now, all of this is to say that
it would make the post Vietnam War era for DARPA
really challenging. Apart from the name change, which was again
to indicate that from this point forward, the agency was
only going to pursue projects that met a specific military need.
All projects related to the Vietnam War were to stop.
(23:43):
Project Agile was called an enormous failure, that all the
attempts to bring research and technology to stop insurgents had
been ineffective at best and counter productive at worst. Several
previous ARPA directors who oversaw Project Agile throughout the years
would admit that their efforts were misguided and ineffective. DARBA
(24:05):
established a new office called Tactical Technology. This office carried
out much of the top secret R and D work
around sensors, improving the technologies that had been part of
the failed electric fence project, as well as more successful
projects like VILA and the submarine sensors. And then there
was the move to research technologies that can mask aircraft
(24:26):
from radar systems. New advanced air defense missile systems were
making it increasingly dangerous to fly missions in combat theaters.
DARPA would tackle this problem by funding research into ways
that an aircraft might foil radar systems, either by absorbing
radar waves so that nothing bounces back, or by reflecting
(24:47):
radar waves off into other directions so that they don't
return to their radar stations, or both. These projects would
evolve into have Blue, the first practical stealth combat aircraft.
This was a proof of concept vehicle the had's first
test flight in nineteen seventy seven, and there's an interesting
behind the scenes story that really shows how secretive all
(25:09):
this stuff was. So the CIA had previously been working
with Lockheed to develop stealth technology that would culminate with
an aircraft called the A twelve Ox cart Plane. I
talked about it in an episode about stealth aircraft. But
the A twelve was so top secret that even the
director of DARPA, who was George Hallmeyer at this time,
(25:33):
he hadn't even heard about it. So when DARPA began
to look for possible contractors to work on stealth technology,
they did not initially consider Lockeed. They weren't They didn't
know that Lockeed had been working on this stuff. They
originally only reached out to McDonald Douglas and to Northrop.
When Lockeed executives found out, they petitioned the CIA to
(25:55):
let them tell DARPA about the stealth technology that the
Super Secrets Gunkworks division had been doing in order to
bid on this contract. The CIA would allow Locked to
tell hal Meyer about the twelve, which later would evolve
into the SR seventy one reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force,
and Lockeed would win this contract. I'll have more to
(26:17):
say about stealth technology and some of the other tech
that DARBA worked on towards the end of the seventies
in just a moment, but first let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. The original design for what
would become Have Blue would later evolve into the F
(26:40):
one seventeen stealth fighter. The original design was nicknamed the
Hopeless Diamond. The sketch was of an aircraft that vaguely
resembled the Hope Diamond and had lots of facets and
odd angles. No one was really sure if it would
be able to fly. The weird angles were part of
the stealth technology. It was all on effort to redirect
(27:02):
those incoming radar signals so that they would not return
to the listing stations. They would bounce off into some
other directions, kind of like using a mirror to direct
a ray of light and you just tilt the mirror
a different direction and the light goes a different way.
By redirecting the radar signals, it would seem to the
radar station that there was nothing in that region of
the sky. That was the whole idea. Much of the
(27:24):
work on the stealth technology took place on the most
famous secret base of all time, which of course is
Area fifty one or the Groom Lake Facility. I've talked
about this base numerous times in this podcast as well.
The Air Force would take over the program in the
late nineteen seventies and conduct flight tests all over the
Tonopah Test Range, which was seventy miles northwest of Area
(27:47):
fifty one. Some people would just call that Area fifty two.
And another big project was in updating the old transit
navigation system. It was a satellite based navigation system that
u ARPA had been involved with in the early sixties.
This effort was to replace that with a more robust
(28:08):
satellite system. In nineteen seventy three, as America was withdrawing
from Vietnam, the Pentagon ordered a joint program for a
single navigation system that all the branches of the military
would be able to use, because at this point, these
various military branches had all been working on their own
systems which were not compatible with one another, and eventually
(28:30):
um the government said, this doesn't make sense. We should
have a more unified approach. So this new program was
called nav Star, and DARPA helped fund the development of
this program, which by was finally ready for full deployment,
and it consisted of twenty four satellites with atomic clocks,
(28:50):
which was necessary for synchronization, and they were launched into
orbit to give global navigation coverage. This information could be
used not just to navigate people around the world, but
also for guided weapons systems. As part of the technology,
designers included what they called an offset feature. It was
it was known as selective availability, and it meant that
(29:14):
if you didn't have the right kind of receiver to
descramble this information and get a readout, you would actually
get a result that would be off by several hundred feet,
which would limit the chances of someone unauthorized making use
of the system, and it would also keep the GPS
network impractical for commercial use. That is until President Bill
Clinton would end the era of selective availability and allow
(29:37):
civilian systems to access information with essentially the same precision
as military systems, and at that point GPS receivers were
accurate enough to be used for things like navigation and cars,
because before you would be you know, you would have
like a precision of down two around a few hundred feet.
(29:58):
That's not very useful when you're trying to look for
return anyway. During Vietnam, DARPA had funded a few drone
programs as well. These were very primitive drones compared to
what we have today, but it was the beginning of
serious work in unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance and for weaponization.
They were code named Prairie and Collare. Both were remotely
(30:20):
piloted vehicles or RPVs, and both used lawnmower motors and
could carry a payload of about twenty eight pounds or
twelve point seven kilograms. These would serve as prototypes for
work in the field, which DARPA would end up handing
over to the Armed Forces in nineteen seventy seven, DARPA
would fund another project for an unmanned aerial vehicle called
(30:43):
Amber that was supposed to be a long endurance u
a V that would get support from the Navy. As
the project was proving promising, but in the late nineteen eighties,
Congress would create a new Joint Program Office to continue
research and development for unmanned aerial vehicles and DARPA was
effectively removed from that process. DARPA would move on to
(31:05):
pursue a new project called Assault Breaker, which had the
goal of bringing together many different disparate technologies in an
effort to make them work together in a system of systems.
This idea of we have all these pieces out there
and they're all effective, but it would be better if
we could actually make a cohesive approach to this. So
(31:27):
the goal was to create a means in which military
commanders would have an enormous amount of information at their
disposal and the capability of launching an attack on a target,
even if that target were well behind enemy lines. This
would require bringing together all of these different technologies that
DARPA had played a part in making a reality. Soviet
Union spies learned about this program, Assault Breaker, and they
(31:51):
reported back to their superiors in Moscow, and as eventually,
military personnel in the Soviet Union wrote up a report
and published it in a journal called Military Thought. It's
actually a classified journal. Only a few high ranking officials
really had access to it. Well, high ranking Soviet officials
and a few U. S. Spies, because, as we know,
(32:12):
everyone is spying on everyone else all the time, always.
So when US officials learned that the Soviet government was
worried that the US was building up a program that
would give America this incredible advantage in both gathering intelligence
and acting upon it, spirits started to run high in
the US because if your enemy is scared, that's good
(32:33):
news for you. I guess. One cool project that started
independently from Darba was one that would eventually be called simnet.
So there was an Air Force pilot named Jack Thorpe
who was thinking about the possibility of networked flight simulators
for the purposes of training pilots, you know, combat training
(32:55):
without actually having to go up in a real jet.
And he had experienced this on a small scale ld.
This was not something he just came up with on
his own. He had already had sort of this experience
in a system that was at the Flying Training Division
of Williams Air Force Base, and that system would allow
two pilots to simulate flying emission together. The simulator was
(33:15):
complete with hydraulic motion system, so it move you as
you're piloting the simulated aircraft. But again it was just
a pair of these simulators that worked together. Thorpe wondered
if perhaps it would be possible to build out a
much larger system with multiple UH simulators all connected to
each other to allow for more complex training. Thorpe wrote
(33:36):
up a paper titled Future Views Aircrew Training nineteen eighty
through two thousand. This was in n when he wrote this,
and he pitched his ideas to top Brass, but they
didn't take it very seriously. To be fair to them,
the tech that Thorpe was proposing was incredibly sophisticated for
(33:56):
the time, and also not many people really knew that
much about the progress that ARPA net had been making
in networking different computer systems together, so no one was
really sure how feasible this was. Thorpe would go on
doing his career and then he would go to the
Naval War College to further his education, and after getting
out of that he was assigned sort of on loan
(34:19):
by the Air Force to DARPA. While he was at DARPA,
his boss asked him, hey, gun, any interesting ideas, you know,
beyond what you're working on. So Thorpe shared his vision
of these networked simulators, and his boss loved this idea
and told Thorpe that you should tell this to Larry Lynn,
who was then the director of DARPA. Larry Lynn liked
(34:40):
it a lot too, and so yes, Thorpe, how much
money do you think it would cost to do this project?
And Thorpe said seventeen million dollars and Lynn said, okay, doky.
So the program began and it became known as Simulator
Networking or sim net. DARPA would contract with delt A
Graphics Incorporated, Perceptronics Incorporated, and bb IN Incorporated to help
(35:05):
build out the system, and they would subcontract with other
companies to build all these simulators. And they weren't just
aircraft simulators. They built tank simulators and other stuff too,
and they networked them all together. The advantages of these
simulators over real world training were numerous. Real world combat
training is obviously very dangerous for some scenarios such as
(35:28):
let's say you want to operate your aircraft, but you
also want to jam the sensors on that aircraft. Not
only is that very dangerous because you're taking away some
of the information that the pilots are relying upon, it's
also potentially problematic because depending on where you're flying these
these training missions, using that jamming technology can affect other
(35:50):
stuff like commercial flights, or maybe the the airspace of allies,
or maybe people who aren't your allies. It could be
really really touchy. But if you simulate it, you can
do pretty much any scenario that the computer is capable
of running. So also, because the systems were networked in theory,
you could have people in different parts of the world
(36:12):
all training together. You didn't have to get them all
in the same place at the same time, though, you
would have to figure out something about lag and latency
for these systems. Symnet in a way was a precursor
to online games that millions of gamers play these days,
like M M O RPGs. They can kind of trace,
uh what not necessarily trace their history back. But symnet
(36:35):
was definitely a precursor to that kind of stuff. There
are many more technologies the DARPA helped fund In the
nineteen seventies, there were xemer lasers. These were used in
communications platforms between aircraft and submerged submarines. They needed to
develop special lasers in the short wave range of lasers.
The longer wavelengths didn't have good penetration in the water,
(36:58):
so you couldn't really use them to communicate with a submarine.
But there was this need to communicate with submarines because
at that point, really the only way a submarine could
communicate with the surface is if the submarine itself surfaced,
and obviously that puts the submarine in a vulnerable position.
Being able to use these short wave lasers and have
(37:19):
them penetrate the water reach the submarine and have the
submarine be able to respond opened up communication in ways
that weren't possible before. DARPA also contributed some of the
components for the Hubble Space Telescope. The agency would design
and help build two antenna booms for the satellite telescope
in the late nineteen seventies and early nineties. DARBA pioneered
(37:42):
the development of a special graphite and aluminum material that
would allow the booms to not just conduct radio frequencies
but also double as structural supports. So these structural supports
that made made the overall telescope lighter. The material was lighter,
it removes some of the need for some extra infrastructure.
And again, if you make your payload lighter to send
(38:05):
off into space, you bring the price down. So weight
is money, So it was a cost saving feature. It
took the better part of a decade for DARPA to
recover in the wake of the Vietnam War. The agency
changed a lot in the nineteen seventies. And we're gonna
leave off for now. We're gonna say goodbye to DARPA
(38:26):
for the time being, but I will come back to
revisit the agency and the projects that funded over the
following decades in future episodes. So we'll talk about things
like star wars and autonomous cars and spying on World
of Warcraft players and more, because DARPA played a role
in all of that kind of stuff. It's a fascinating story.
(38:47):
And again, because of the work that DARPA has helped fund,
we have access to some pretty incredible technologies that you know,
rolled out a few years later based on that early work.
So it's definitely benefited us in many, many ways. The
agency has also created stuff that's been at best controversial
(39:10):
and it worst incredibly incredibly harmful, like Agent Orange is
the one to point to easily as being a truly
terrible thing. So you take the good, you take the bad,
you take them both, and there you have DARPA. I
guess we will revisit this in the future, but in
the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions for topics
(39:33):
you would like me to cover on tech Stuff, some
sort of technology, a company, a person in tech, whatever
it may be, go to tech Stuff podcast dot com.
You can find all the ways to contact us there.
I look forward to hearing from you. Make sure you
check out our merchandise store over at t public dot
com slash tech Stuff. Don't forget we are nominated in
(39:56):
the I Heart Radio Podcast Awards, so make sure you
support tech Stuff there. I would love to be able
to accept an award. I'm I'm going to be at
the awards ceremony, so make sure that the speech I
write is one that I get to give people. Also,
just go check out the awards see if there are
shows nominated that you really love. It's always nice to
(40:18):
give some support to the creators who make the stuff
you really enjoy, whether it's tech stuff or something else.
I I joke a lot about supporting tech stuff, but honestly,
I think you should support whichever shows you feel deserve
it the most. And if it's my show, I am
very thankful for that. But if it's not, No Sweat,
I think that a good work deserves recognition. So go
(40:41):
check that out and I'll talk to you again really
soon for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it has stuff works dot Com. Eight
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