Lusser's Law
Collins, Reid
S ometime in August, the interagency Columbia Accident Investigation Board is set to declare the probable cause of February's space shuttle disaster: the now-famous chunk of foam that struck the...
...In an interview with this reporter in the mid-1950s, Lusser declared: "Man can never go to the moon," he explained, as the probabilities of disaster with which he had wrestled for a lifetime were simply too great...
...In his native Germany, Lusser had an early established reputation for genius...
...Lusser's law was not to be denied...
...He developed the Messerschmitt ME-109, for a time the world's fastest aircraft and a mainstay fighter of the German Luftwaffe...
...Lusser also engineered the Heinkel HE-219 night fighter...
...More than six thousand British civilians died...
...The United States lost three Apollo 13 astronautsto a launch-pad fire, prompting a hasty switch from pure oxygen for breathing to an oxygen-nitrogen mix and elimination of flammable materials inside the craft...
...Later he would make European headlines by accurately predicting the failures of the German-bought F-104 Lockheed Starfighters, which were converted to all-purpose requirements they could not possibly meet...
...The Soviets lost an early space pilot, then a three-man crew on failed reentries...
...Unlike von Braun, who arrived in the West at war's end, Robert Lusser didn't get to the United States until 1948, working first with the U.S...
...Robert Lusser—chief of the reliability section at Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun's development center in Huntsville, Alabama—had always worried that the missile propulsion systems he worked on could not be made reliable enough...
...He was sixty-nine when he died in January 1969, seven months before men did what he thought to be reliably forbidden—they landed on the moon, and came back...
...And this from a man charged with trying to make it happen...
...As in the past investigations, the Columbia Accident Board will assign a probable cause and in hindsight it will all look preventable...
...Thousands were launched against British cities after the Royal Air Force defeated Germany's manned bombers...
...Its...
...French prisoners of war working on the farm said the plane bore British markings—odd, because the others in the formation appeared to be American, as daylight raids typically were...
...Of five space shuttles built, two have now been lost: the Challenger on launch in 1986 and more recently the Columbia on reentry, in both cases with total fatalities of the crews...
...What it will surely not say is that the tragedy is the latest fateful application of "Lusser's law...
...Most famously—or infamously—Lusser engineered the first cruise missile, the ram- or pulse-jet powered V-1 "Buzz Bomb...
...S ometime in August, the interagency Columbia Accident Investigation Board is set to declare the probable cause of February's space shuttle disaster: the now-famous chunk of foam that struck the leading edge of the left wing during the first moments of liftoff...
...His assignment there was to apply probability formulae—collectively known as Lusser's law, and presaging later systems theory—to the rockets von Braun hoped would send men to the moon...
...But unlike Von Braun, he never caught the fever for manned space exploration...
...There will ensue a debate over funding for safety...
...The irony is that the late Dr...
...Twenty of the planes crashed, killing a dozen pilots...
...Lusser himself, away at the V-1 works at the time, always wondered about that...
...Hildegard Lusser...
...Unless of course they want to know the real odds and consult "Lusser's law...
...But beneath it all will still lurk a mathematical rule of reliability intuited by a German genius whose name is unknown to most Americans...
...Yes, indeed—especially at a time when a Senate majority leader named Lyndon Baines Johnson was leading the budget battle over a nascent NASA...
...More may...
...Impolitic...
...A stick of seven bombs was dropped, one hitting the house and killing Mrs...
...But Lusser's law has exacted its price nonetheless...
...Lusser's daughter, Traute Grether,recalls her father was "completely convinced reentry would not work...
...Navy's missile development facility at Point Mugu on the California coast, then at the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Labs, and finally at Redstone with von Braun, starting in 1953...
...In January of 1959 Lusser left Huntsville, returned to Germany, and joined the combined Heinkel-Messerschmitt-Boelkow concern...
...Lusser spent his last days and a lot of his fortune trying to market a ski binding he had designed to release at just the right time of stress...
...Among the engineers and program managers at (then) Cape Canaveral, the joke became that if they waited for "the Germans" in Huntsville to declare their rocket ready, it would never leave the ground...
...Cantankerous and confrontational, he fought with both Willy Messerschmitt and Ernst Heinkel, and at one time or other quit both...
...Heads have already rolled...
...But an America alarmed by Soviet space achievements was not to be deterred by mathematical formulae...
...On March 13, 1945, a few weeks before the official end of World War II in Europe, a single aircraft peeled off from a flight of Allied bombers high over Upper Bavaria and headed for a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere—the sanctuary to which Lusser had sent his wife and four children...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
