When America Had an Atomic Mecha Warrior Robot

August 23, 2021 2:20 PM

“Fix an atomic rocket engine? Clean up spills of radioactivity? Rescue H-bomb victims? That’s what the Beetle is for.” This costly mechanical beast had a single purpose: to service and repair the USAF’s atomic-powered aircraft. Beetle’s specs might seem overkill, especially since it was created to service a vehicle that didn’t yet exist, but that’s not the case. It needed every bit of its power and shielding, especially if the pilot inside wanted to live.
posted by geoff. (24 comments total)

WOW. That thing looks amazing. Definitely belongs in a 50s/early 60s sci-fi movie.
posted by davidmsc at 2:59 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

"The dream of an atomic aircraft was eventually abandoned. Even the best-built airplanes eventually crash, and to have a flying nuclear reactor crash into the ground and explode like a grenade, completely unshielded, into a populated area…The US military decided no benefit was worth that kind of risk."

Happier times, yo.
posted by rikschell at 3:22 PM on August 23, 2021 [10 favorites]

Its last official location was at Area 25 (affectionately called “Jackass Flats”), but there’s no record of its decommissioning, scraping, or otherwise. More likely than not, the US military junked the Beetle with no fanfare or ceremony, and cannibalized what they could, especially those costly manipulator arms.

I'm pretty sure this translates from US Army English to civilian English as "Oh, that? Yeah, we let Bob take that home as scrap. He messed around with it for a while and let the neighborhood kids smash up old cars with it at the county fair. Then it really broke and rusted in place and eventually they had it hauled away for scrap."
posted by loquacious at 3:28 PM on August 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

America’s only nuclear-powered bomber.
TLDR: While it did fly with an active reactor on-board, the reactor was never connected to power the engines.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:30 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

On the Internet, nobody knows you're an atomic mecha-Beetle. (Although you should have guessed when you found out I retired at Jackass Flats.)
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:35 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Engineers and scientists contracted by the USAF created, improved, and the demonstrated hundreds (possibly thousands) of different designs and approaches to making the atomic aircraft. Many featured relatively small modular reactors, such as those seen on nuclear submarines.

Excepting maybe the reactor for the NR-1, no nuclear submarine reactor is even remotely small or modular enough to be suitable for an aircraft.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 3:38 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

I thought Jackass Flats is where the banhammer sends you. It’s like The Cornfield, only more arid.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:39 PM on August 23, 2021 [10 favorites]

Coming soon to Fallout 5
posted by glonous keming at 3:56 PM on August 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

But could it learn… to love?
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:05 PM on August 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

Sounds like Tex loved it.
posted by sammyo at 4:29 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Let us not forget Project Pluto.
posted by Splunge at 4:35 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Let us not forget Project Pluto.

Especially given the Russians are making their own version.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:29 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

But could it learn… to love?

Judging by the first photo, the mech got game.
posted by geoff. at 5:38 PM on August 23, 2021

The connection to Alvin was fascinating. Seems like every cool techy thing in my childhood was a spinoff from Cold War R&D.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:03 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

the manipulator arm diodes blowing again and again

Wow! I had forgotten about poor old Marvin The Paranoid Android, and the pain in the diodes on his left side.
posted by monotreme at 6:44 PM on August 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

Project Pluto

Inspiration of course for Mefi's own Charles Stross writing A Colder War.
posted by tavella at 6:57 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

It reminds me strongly of the Atlas from Mass Effect 3, especially as, just as the Beetle gave rise to RUM and the DSV Alvin, the Atlas was modified into the Triton in the Leviathan DLC.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:37 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Had a teacher who's dad was a rocket scientist and nuclear enigneer. What he told us was the idea for a nuclear bomber was for a Post Nuclear war. So this thing flys around for weeks until the zombies cleared.
He also worked on the nuclear tank which was boondoggle and that either a part of the plane or the beetle is at Jackass but in a containment area because it was hot.
posted by clavdivs at 7:57 PM on August 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

> Thorzdad:
"America’s only nuclear-powered bomber.
TLDR: While it did fly with an active reactor on-board, the reactor was never connected to power the engines."

If you're ever in the vicintiy of Idaho Falls or Craters of the Moon, you can go see the prototype reactors that they were using to develop the technology to actually do this. They are sitting in the parking lot of the EBR-1 Historical site at the Idaho National Laboritory on US 20.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 6:10 AM on August 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

This seems like a good project for Kerbal Space Program.
posted by nickmark at 6:55 AM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

With the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile on the way, Strategic Air Command had to justify its existence. So, in the era of nuclear everything, a nuclear bomber was a 'natural' idea, as impractical as it obviously was. You can see that in the wikipedia article on the Polaris missile which says: "As the Polaris missile was fired underwater from a moving platform, it was essentially invulnerable to counterattack. This led the Navy to suggest, starting around 1959, that they be given the entire nuclear deterrent role."

That didn't, if you'll pardon the pun, fly, although I think I remember that Carter (himself an ex-ballistic sub man) raised the idea of scrapping the rest of the nuclear deterrence 'triad,' that is the land-based ballistic missile and SAC, early in his presidency, on the grounds that the improved accuracy and MIRV capability of the Poseidon made the rest unnecessary if deterrence was the goal. There was a very strong argument in this context that the Peacekeeper deployment under the Reagan administration should be seen as a first-strike weapon. However, by Reagan's time SAC was largely seen as irrelevant and even the B-2 program was considered a huge boondoggle at the time.

As a child of the Carter and Reagan eras, I was always interested in this stuff, so excuse my rambling on about it.
posted by sfred at 7:42 AM on August 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

"The dream of an atomic aircraft was eventually abandoned. Even the best-built airplanes eventually crash, and to have a flying nuclear reactor crash into the ground and explode like a grenade, completely unshielded, into a populated area…The US military decided no benefit was worth that kind of risk."

Happier times, yo.

Until you learn that the same military fumbled several atomic bombs from planes here and there and 6 are missing. There are bombs somewhere in Georgia, North Carolina and several others in various oceans including one just 80 miles off the coast of Japan. Now they are unlikely to go off like nuclear bombs but it is still disconcerting.
posted by srboisvert at 8:36 AM on August 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Tex Scraper" is an awesome name.
posted by doctornemo at 11:54 AM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

So basically, Metal Gear did exist, but was an American device, not a Soviet one?
posted by pwnguin at 11:45 AM on August 25, 2021