Bringing back the Starfighter to launch tiny rockets

Even at the high altitudes for which it was designed, the F-104 could be a handful. One very nearly claimed a very high-profile victim. Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound, flew a specialised version of the F-104 during his time at the Aerospace Research Pilot School in the 1960s. On 10 December 1963, Yeager flew his modified Starfighter above the California desert. He activated the rocket motor, which tilted the aircraft up and pushed it past 100,000ft (around 30,500m). He then prepared to use the rocket thrusters. These, however, pushed the aircraft into a flat spin. Yeager stayed inside the spinning jet, hoping that he’d be able to regain control when the Starfighter entered heavier air closer to the ground.

Yeager soon realised his Starfighter was doomed – he couldn’t stop the aircraft from spinning. He launched his ejector seat, but as his parachute opened his helmet visor was struck by the bottom of the seat. Molten propellant from the seat’s rocket motor burned through the visor, turning to flame as it reached the oxygen in Yeager’s pressure suit. The test pilot only put out the fire inside his suit by removing a glove and fanning the flames with his bare hand. Yeager floated to the ground – his face and half his hair burned out, and an eye socket cut from the collision with his chair – landing not far from the charred remains of his plane.

It was West Germany’s Luftwaffe that had the most problems. Out of the 1,000 F-104s it bought, nearly 300 were lost in accidents. German pilots dubbed the Starfighter the ‘Widow Maker’ or ‘Lawn Dart’. One widely known joke went: “How do you get your hands on a Starfighter? Buy a field – and wait.”

“The German Air Force learned that the hard way. We lost many planes and pilots, but that’s because the plane was being flown in an environment it wasn’t meant for,” says Merklinghaus. Take away the need to fly very fast and very low above the German countryside, and the Starfighter’s safety record would improve immensely. And there is one company that plans to take the 60-year-old fighter into service for some years to come.

Cubecab plans to launch very small satellites – known as cubesats – using a rocket that weighs a similar amount. It’s much smaller, and therefore cheaper, than any other launch method currently available.Cubecab will strap its lightweight rockets, each carrying a satellite weighing around 10kg, on to the kind of underwing ‘pylons’ usually used to fire missiles. And Starfighters Inc, a Florida-based company which still flies a handful of F-104s, will take their pint-sized payloads up to the edge of the stratosphere and fire them into orbit.

“We intend to have very fast times between ordering and launching,” says Still. “We aim for 30 days from order to launch, most launch providers work on the timescale of about two-to-three years from order to launch. A typical mission might be getting an order from a college to launch a cubesat into a specific orbit."

Still hopes the Starfighters will launch their first satellites sometime in 2018. The F-104s will fly over the Atlantic Ocean, their pilots taking the jets to around 60,000ft, the jets climbing at an acute angle to give the rockets the right trajectory to leave the pull of the Earth’s gravity. Once more, a Starfighter pilot will look out of the confines of his cockpit and see the curve of the Earth, the sky a rich blue-black above.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160826-the-1950s-jet-launching-tiny-satellites