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By William Park
18 March 2016

On permanent display in the Royal Armouries collection at Fort Nelson,

Hampshire are two huge, steel pipes bolted together and projecting high into
the air. Theyre enormous, big enough for someone to crawl through.

These giant cylinders are one of the few remaining pieces of a contender for
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one of the most audacious pieces of engineering ever designed: a

supergun called Big Babylon, which could have fired satellites into orbit
from a 156m-long barrel (512ft) embedded inside a hill.

Its Canadian inventor, Gerald Bull, who was one of the worlds leading

artillery experts, had high hopes that it would revolutionise space launches,
removing the need for conventional rockets. Bull was an outstanding

scientist and a charismatic figure, and this is the physical reminder of what

he did on a monumental scale, says Nicholas Hall, Keeper of Artillery at the

Royal Armouries.

But Big Babylon was never built, and no-one has got close since. So what

happened? The answer is a tale of hubris, thwarted ambitions and military

secrets. At a time when Bulls expertise should have been in high demand
by all of the worlds superpowers, he chose to make his supergun for
Saddam Hussein instead, a decision that would end in murder.

Decades later, tantalising questions remain: could Bulls supergun idea have
worked? And might the idea that died with him ever return?

A gifted academic, Bull began working with the Canadian and US

governments researching supergun technology in the 1960s. Initially,

engineers used his designs to test supersonic flight without the need for an

expensive wind tunnel, by firing projectiles short distances through the barrel
of a large gun. But although he would end up spending much of his career in
government-funded weapons research designing rockets and guns for
warring countries, his personal ambition was to use his designs to
launch satellites not missiles.

Low cost was the concept, at least, explains Andrew Higgins, a professor

at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, Canada.

Rather than throwing away the first stage of a rocket, using a large gun for

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the first stage would enable this hardware to be reused and easily serviced.
In 1961, Bull began working on the High Altitude Research Project (Harp), a
joint venture between the US and Canadian governments. Using modified
ex-Navy guns, Bull and his colleagues fired weather probes into sub-orbit

and back down again. The costly and controversial Vietnam War meant
the project was canned in 1967 before they could get any objects into

orbit, but it teased Bull with the possibility of creating a satellite-launching

supergun a spacegun.

The idea appealed to Bull because it would remove

By using a supergun
you can bypass the
costly first moments of
a rocket launch

the need for multiple rocket stages to reach orbit.

The first moments of a conventional rocket launch

require a huge amount of energy to get the rocket

moving, because this is when the vehicle is filled with

the most amount of fuel, and the atmosphere is at its
thickest. Whats more, rocket motors are expensive.
The Harp launch guns could reach 2km/s, explains

Higgins, and if you used gas to power the projectiles, you could go much
faster. They really replace the first 1.5 stages of a conventional launch
vehicle, he says.

You might think that no satellite could survive the huge g-force of

acceleration of a spacegun launch, but this is often over exaggerated,

according to Higgins. Military artillery shells today have GPS and laser-

guidance optics and electronics that survive these accelerations, so it can be

done. Obviously, not everything can be launched this way, but gun launch is
well suited for launching fuel and building materials.

Punching through the lower (denser) part of the atmosphere at high speed
is an intense heat transfer problem, but ablative coatings and heat shields

on the nose of the projectile should be up to the job, says Higgins. One of
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the main downsides would be the sonic boom, an environmental, or even

political, concern, he adds.

Bull was convinced that his supergun designs were the way forward, he just

needed the funding. The problem was that by the 1970s the rest of the world
had lost interest in superguns and were now looking elsewhere. To find

money, Bull began to sell weapons and continued to develop his space
supergun as a side project. He set up a private company the Space

Research Corporation of Quebec and soon started selling arms to the

South African government.

In 1976, Bull was arrested in South Africa for violating the United Nations
arms embargo and he served six months in a US prison, wrote the New

York Times after his death. On release he began selling to South Africa

again, and this time was fined $55,000 for international arms dealing. Fed up
with the involvement of the Canadian and US governments in his work he
moved to Brussels, Belgium, and began operating through a European
company.

Bull was not tricky to work with, according to Hall, but he did seem to have

become darker towards the end of his career more autocratic. I dont think
he was the archetypal mad genius figure, adds Hall. But he was slowly
alienating himself from the Western world.

In 1981, the Iraqi government contacted Bull to design artillery for them to

use in the Iraq-Iran war. At this time, Saddam Hussein was the Iraqi defence
secretary; he liked Bull and his designs after they proved vital in their
campaign.

He was particularly interesting to Hussein because he could help him with

their artillery problems, says Hall. At the time, working with Iraq wasnt

such a strange decision because they werent a threat to the West. Hussein
wanted to be the leader of the Arab world and show his success with their

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technology. He did wish for some sort of space programme, so this would
have appealed to Bull. He was a great catch for Hussein as an expert.

Finally, in 1988, the Iraqi government paid Bull $25

Hussein wanted to be
the leader of the Arab
world and show his
success with their
technology Nicholas
Hall

million to begin Project Babylon the first true

spacegun project on the condition that he

continued to work on their artillery. Project Babylon

began life as three superguns; two full-sized Big
Babylon 1000mm calibre guns and a prototype
350mm calibre gun called Baby Babylon. The

full-size Big Babylon barrel would have been 156m in

length with a one metre bore. In total it would have
weighed 1,510 tonnes; far too big to be

transportable, and so instead would have been

mounted at a 45 degree angle on a hillside.

Big Babylon would have overshadowed all previous supergun designs for

size including guns built for military use like the giant German guns from
the two World Wars and later spacegun designs although we can only
estimate other details, like launch velocity.

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You can see a larger version of this graphic here (Credit: Nigel Hawtin)
Using nine tonnes of special supergun propellant, Big Babylon would have
been theoretically capable of firing a 600kg projectile across 1,000

kilometres, putting Kuwait and Iran well within striking distance from inside
Iraq. Alternatively, the gun could be used to launch a 2,000kg rocketassisted projectile carrying a 200kg satellite.

To do this would have required an enormous charge.

The full-size Big

Babylon barrel would

One very considerable technical problem with a gun

of this size is how you ignite the charge, says Hall.
It burns quickly, but with such a long barrel you

need a sustained release. This means you need to

solve some far more complicated calculations than

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have been 156m in

length and it would
have weighed 1,510
tonnes

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160317-the-man-who-tried-to-make-...

with smaller types of artillery. He believes Bull could

have worked it out though.

We know roughly what the projectiles would have

looked like. Something similar to an anti-tank round,

where the projectile is housed in a light-weight

casing which falls away at the muzzle of the gun.

Beyond that, we dont really know.

Had Bull been able to solve these issues, the capabilities of Big Babylon
would have made the supergun an attractively cheap way to launch

satellites. The cost was roughly $1,727 per kilogram, adjusting for inflation.

By comparison, Nasa estimates that it costs $22,000 per kilogram to launch

a modern satellite into orbit using conventional rockets.

Bull wasnt the only one who saw the potential in superguns experiments

elsewhere around the same time supported the idea that it could work. In the
late 1980s, a scientist at the US Lawrence Livermore National Lab called
John Hunter with a background in magnetic guns began to work on

gas-powered guns with a few million dollars in funding and the project name
Super Harp (or Sharp), as an homage to Bulls earlier endeavours.

A powder gun like the one used in Harp and a gas gun like Sharp both work
in the same basic way expanding gases. The lighter the gases molecular

weight, the faster it expands in air. Gunpowder has a molecular weight of 22,
slightly less than air at around 28, but ignited gunpowder is incredibly hot, so
thats why it expands so quickly. The hydrogen used in gas guns, however,
has a molecular weight of two so expands extraordinarily quickly in air.

Harp would have used a powder gun to get [the projectile] to about 2 km/s,

then used a rocket to get the rest of the way to the 8 km/s required for orbit,
says Higgins. Gas guns (like Sharp) have proven to get to speeds of 6

km/s. So the projectile is already travelling much closer to the required

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speed to enter orbit.

The benefit would be that less space would be needed for propellant to carry
it fully into orbit, providing much more room for satellites, fuel or building
materials.

Sharp demonstrated that gas gun technology could reach escape velocity
and Bull was aware of Hunters work but theres no evidence he was
inspired by this technology.

Bull wasnt ignorant to the possibility that Iraq could use his supergun

technology to fire missiles, but he justified his actions by pointing out that it
would be an impractical weapon, says Hall. Its size meant that it would not

be possible to move the gun once it was constructed; it only pointed in one
direction, was slow to fire, could be easily located and easily destroyed if

anyone wished to. Everyone would know where it was, and everyone would
immediately know if it had been fired from the seismic tremors it caused.

The recoil force from the gun would have totalled 27,000 tonnes equivalent
to a nuclear explosion and would have registered as a major seismic event
around the world. It was completely vulnerable to air attack, says Hall. You
couldnt move it. But of course when one allows ones brain to think about
what Hussein then did, its tempting to consider it as a military threat.

Its possible, of course, that the Iraqi government

wanted the weapon despite its weaknesses. It was

When the gun fired it

would have registered
as a major seismic
event around the
world

meant for long-range attack and also to blind spy

satellites, General Hussein Kamel al-Majeed, who

supervised Iraqs weapons development programme,

is quoted as saying after he defected to Jordan to
work with the United Nations. Our scientists were

seriously working on that. It was designed to explode

a shell in space that would have sprayed a sticky
material on the satellite and blinded it.

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By May 1989 Baby Babylon, the 45-metre long prototype gun, was

completed and mounted on a hillside, and tests began. The smaller gun
should have been easily capable of launching a projectile 750km.

Components for the Big Babylon gun were manufactured in Great Britain,

Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy. The enormous steel pipes
on display at Fort Nelson were manufactured in the UK by Sheffield
Forgemasters known for manufacturing high quality steel.
Less than a year later, however, it would all come to an end.

On March 22 1990 Bull was shot three times in the back and twice in the
head as he entered his Brussels apartment. No one witnessed his

assassination the gun was silenced and a killer was never identified. In
the months before his killing, Bulls flat was broken into on several

occasions. With hindsight, this might have been a warning of what was to

come. The New York Times reported that when police arrived at the scene
they found the key still in his door and his unopened briefcase containing
nearly $20,000 in cash.

Its not known who killed him. The Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, was
linked with the assassination of Bull, not because of the supergun

directly, but because of the work he was doing additionally to improve Iraqs
ballistic missile technology. Others linked the US, UK and South African
intelligence services, as well as Iraq themselves.

After his death, Project Babylon went cold. Two weeks later, UK customs
seized supergun components leaving the midlands port of Teesport.

Iraq invaded Kuwait shortly after and that ended Western involvement with
the Iraqi regime.

So could superguns ever make a return? Some have tried. In 2009, Hunter
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and two other colleagues began a new venture off the back of Sharp. The

project was called Quicklaunch, and it hoped to use hydrogen-powered gas

guns to fire fuel to space station depots for use in manned spaceflight to the
Moon and to Mars.

The launcher was designed to be 1,100m long and to float in the ocean

almost entirely underwater with only the 3m wide muzzle projecting above

the waves. The advantage of this over all the earlier land-based designs is
that the gun could be moved and angled easily, allowing more than one

launch a day to different orbits. Hunter even suggests, in this Google Tech
Talk from 2009, that the gun could launch a payload every two hours.

However, the project never really got going because of internal issues,

according to Hunter. Its no more. Theres some intellectual property there

but the members have split up.

It also looks unlikely that any supergun projects will restart given that Space
Xs reusable rocket launchers have been dominating the headlines. For

now, with the work Elon Musk is doing with Space X theres no room for a

project like Quicklaunch, says Hunter. But Im happy as a clam for Elon, I
really am, because it takes the monkey off my back.

Someone with Musks financial clout could explore superguns if he wanted,

Hunter adds, but its probably not in his interest to undercut his efforts with

rockets. Elon is a smart businessman, he understands that if he pursued a

less conventional method he would lose the backing he has, he says. He

would rock the boat too much. He would lose his base. It would be a mistake
to support this even if he knows the physics is right.

Theres also the fact that Bull clouded the potential of superguns by his
choice of politically controversial backers. Theres a stigma around

superguns that mean they are unlikely to be considered even if theyre a

better technology for launching satellites, says Hall.

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Hunter is optimistic about the future though. I think

well see superguns again. Theres a chance that I

Theres a stigma
around superguns
that mean they are
unlikely to be
considered Nicholas
Hall

will take it forward if Elon drops the ball, but for now
we need too many miracles for it to work out.

However, a handful of universities and research

facilities around the world do still use supergun-like

technology on a smaller scale for aerospace

engineering. Only not to launch satellites, but to test

high-speed impacts of space debris on satellites
protective layers.

The gif above shows high-speed impact of a 1cm diameter aluminium

projectile on 3mm aluminium satellite shielding essentially the same

protection used on the International Space Station at 6.5km/s (Credit:

Andrew Higgins)

I operate a gun in my lab here at McGill that is

At the end of the war

the UN seized and

nudging up to 11 km/s (almost escape velocity),

says Higgins. And there are even plans to design

guns that reach up to 15km/s. These incredible

speeds are needed to test what happens when tiny

fragments of space debris strike the outer layers of

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destroyed the one

working Baby
Babylon prototype

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satellites, something not possible to achieve without

these high-powered gas guns. So while no satellites

are being launched with Bulls technology, it is being

used to protect the ones that are already up there.
Meanwhile, the remaining parts of Bulls supergun

are mostly sitting in storage, or in museum displays. At the end of the war

the UN seized and destroyed the one working Baby Babylon prototype and

the remaining components of the two Big Babylon guns, as well as evidence
of Iraqi designs for their own supergun.

Some parts survived though: those seized by UK customs. After they were
not needed as evidence, they would normally have been sold or cut up,

says Hall. Because customs were interested in the story, they arranged for
some of the pipes to be given to museums, and the MOD kept some.

To the outside eye, those two giant cylinders in the Royal Armoury dont look
like much you could mistake them for an oil pipe but these chunks of

metal are some of the last remaining fragments of Gerald Bulls legacy: a
man whose dreams of aiming high brought him crashing back to Earth.
-William Park is BBC Futures social media producer. He tweets at
@williamhpark.

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