![]() The full-size Big Babylon barrel would have been 156m in length with a one metre bore. Project Babylon began life as three superguns two full-sized Big Babylon 1000mm calibre guns and a prototype 350mm calibre gun called Baby Babylon. 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.įinally, in 1988, the Iraqi government paid Bull $25 million to begin Project Babylon – the first true spacegun project – on the condition that he continued to work on their artillery. On release he began selling to South Africa again, and this time was fined $55,000 for international arms dealing. 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. He set up a private company – the Space Research Corporation of Quebec – and soon started selling arms to the South African government. To find money, Bull began to sell weapons and continued to develop his space supergun as a side project. The problem was that by the 1970s the rest of the world had lost interest in superguns and were now looking elsewhere. One of the main downsides would be the sonic boom, an environmental, or even political, concern, he adds.īull was convinced that his supergun designs were the way forward, he just needed the funding. “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. Obviously, not everything can be launched this way, but gun launch is well suited for launching fuel and building materials. “Military artillery shells today have GPS and laser-guidance optics and electronics that survive these accelerations, so it can be done. 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. 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. 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. At a time when Bull’s expertise should have been in high demand by all of the world’s superpowers, he chose to make his supergun for Saddam Hussein instead, a decision that would end in murder.ĭecades later, tantalising questions remain: could Bull’s supergun idea have worked? And might the idea that died with him ever return?Ī gifted academic, Bull began working with the Canadian and US governments researching supergun technology in the 1960s. ![]() So what happened? The answer is a tale of hubris, thwarted ambitions and military secrets. But Big Babylon was never built, and no-one has got close since.
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