Word: boron
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Government last week took an old-fashioned ax to the next generation of U.S. military aircraft in what may well be the start of a new cutback in aircraft and missile programs. The Air Force announced that it was abandoning plans to produce high-energy boron aircraft fuels at Olin Mathieson Corp.'s two-city-block, $45 million plant near Niagara Falls, which was scheduled to deliver its first batch of exotic fuel this month. It also canceled a contract with the General Electric Co. for producing the J-93-5 engine to power North American Aviation...
Range v. Money. The exotic-fuel program was a casualty of Defense Secretary McElroy's drive to cut back all "marginal" defense work in an all-out effort to pare down the 1961 budget. It put an end to present hopes for boron-powered planes that would get 40% more energy out of a pound of fuel, thus increase their range (or speed) without adding weight. The Navy has already spent $122 million in the program, the Air Force another $110 million. The first group of 20 B-70s with boron afterburners would have cost $3.5 billion...
...Force v. Navy. The Air Force still sees great promise in high-energy fuels for rockets and ramjet engines, intends to continue working on them at two small pilot plants. But the Navy has decided to abandon its work in the field entirely, convinced that boron fuels do not hold the great promise it expected...
...will go ahead with its J-93-3 engine, which accounts for $90 million of its $100 million contract with the Air Force. The J-93-3 is conventionally fueled, is scheduled to go into both North American's B70 and its F108 fighter. Officials insist that the boron cutback itself does not mean a cutback in the B70 bomber program, but only an alteration in the bomber to make it wholly conventionally fueled, and that the cutback has no relation to the F-108, which was programed to use conventional fuels all along. But many aircraft men feel...
EXOTIC FUEL DEAL will link Dow Chemical with U.S. Borax (TIME, June 10, 1957) to research ways for economic manufacture of boron trichloride, used in high-energy Space Age fuels...