Two sections of Iraq’s “Big Babylon” supergun on display at the Royal Armouries in Fareham, UK, in 2006. The cannon was the brainchild of Canadian ballistics engineer Gerald Bull. (Wikimedia Commons)

How One Canadian Engineer’s Effort to Build a ‘Space Gun’ Ended in Tragedy

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Gerald Bull is in many ways a tragic figure, whose single-minded pursuit of a cannon that could launch satellites into space led to growing ethical compromises—and eventually his assassination.

For many decades, humans have flirted with the idea of using giant cannons to send projectiles into space. The notion was notably depicted in a Jules Verne novel, From the Earth to the Moon, in 1865; Verne’s novel was groundbreaking in that the French novelist attempted to perform rough calculations on how much energy such a gun would require, many of which were remarkably accurate. Verne’s novel later inspired the groundbreaking 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon, which was somewhat less realistic.

By the mid-20th century, the idea of a “space gun” had crossed from speculative fiction into the domain of engineering. Though the concept sounds far-fetched, it is theoretically sound: using a single ground-based explosion to propel a projectile into orbit is potentially a far cheaper method of payload delivery than a rocket continuously burning fuel on its way up. On the flip side, there are good reasons that such a gun has never been built—chiefly the prohibitive upfront costs of building the cannon, the need for the payload to withstand a sudden acceleration of thousands of Gs, and the problem of atmospheric drag on the projectile. It remains an interesting idea, and several startups are working on the problem—although interest has waned amid Elon Musk’s recent successes with rocket recovery, significantly lowering the cost of using rockets.

Much of the work on a modern “space gun” is derived from the research and innovations of one man: a Canadian aeronautical engineer named Gerald Bull, who dreamed of using a huge cannon to economically launch satellites and other payloads into space. Bull’s life is worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy; a brilliant but irascible engineer, his scientific zeal and desire to see a functioning space gun led him to make a series of increasingly unethical decisions in single-minded pursuit of that goal. Ultimately, a combination of politics, national security concerns, and international diplomacy doomed his project—and cost him his life.

Gerald Bull: The Most Dangerous Canadian in History

Gerald Bull entered the University of Toronto in 1944, at the age of 16. He studied aeronautical engineering, where his academic record was described as “strictly average.” Nevertheless, Bull went on to earn his PhD from the University of Toronto in only three years, finishing at age 23—a record that still stands as the youngest in the university’s history. His master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation dealt with advanced wind tunnels, one of which he designed and built with a fellow graduate student. While finishing his PhD work in the early 1950s, Bull took a volunteer position at the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment (CARDE), which studied and experimented with artillery and ballistics in cooperation with the US military.

Bull became a full-fledged staff member at CARDE after he completed his doctoral work. He and some graduate students built a Mach 4 wind tunnel from scrap in 1954 for only $6,000. Bull then used his own department’s money to fund a program to create a telemetry system that could fit in his models.

Bull then........

© The National Interest