To my great surprise, the copy of J. Gordon Vaeth’s (2005) “They Sailed The Skies” that I ordered from the US (and hence wasn’t expecting for a few weeks) arrived today. It’s a colourful, fascinating, and very well-illustrated book (and I thoroughly recommend it). Yet I was most interested in his final “Epilogue” chapter that deals (along with various other post-WWII ballooning stories) with Project Helios.
“Project Durante”
Having first established Lieutenant Harris F. Smith’s absolute suitability for piloting Project Helios’ balloon cluster (“unflappable… a Princeton graduate, accomplished in diplomacy and personal relationships”), Vaeth then opens up a completely new angle on what happened to Helios that I haven’t seen anywhere else (p. 138):
A flight to the top of the atmosphere and a world’s altitude record was a glittering attraction. It brought engineers, physicist, biologists, medical doctors, and others out of the woodwork, all wanting a piece of the action. Lt. Cdr. George Hoover, the project’s sponsor at the Special Devices Center, took to calling it Project Durante, recalling that comedian’s line that “everybody wants to get inta da act”.
Those who became involved included Navy “brass” who allowed Smith to be elbowed out and replaced by a Navy commander with no record of significant ballooning achievements.
So it seems that I now have an entirely new missing Navy pilot to find, one distinguished mainly by his, errm, indistinctitude.
Continuing, Vaeth repeats the now-standard explanations for Project Helios’s failure, i.e. the polyethylene film was unreliable, and launching a cluster of hundred balloons all at the same time was just too difficult. All the same, I have to point out that Charlie Moore and the other Project Mogul guys were launching clusters of General Mills polyethylene balloons in early July 1947 using a Project Helios frame (and apparently with Lt. Harris F. Smith’s help), so it clearly wasn’t that unreliable or that difficult. Hey ho.
Note that Princeton’s archives has a file linked to Harris F. Smith, though because it is dated 1941, it almost certainly relates to his undergraduate activities there rather than to his time in the US Navy or later.
George Hoover’s (Missing) Autobiography
Craig Ryan’s (1995) “The Pre-Astronauts” briefly mentions (p. 277) that the ONR’s (by then retired) Commander George Hoover was busy working “on his autobiography at his home in Pacific Palisades, California. His book will tell the whole story behind the events at the ONR in the 1940s“. Ryan continues (echoing Vaeth’s summary above):
According to Hoover, other organizations within the Navy, civilian contractors, and – later – the Air Force all attempted to gain control of and take credit for the ideas and technology in Project Helios. “I had to work on these things secretly, give them code names, and bury them inside all the other projects I had going on. Let me tell you, it was a real cut-throat operation.”
However, I’ve found no indication that Hoover ever finished writing up his life story: he died in March 1998. There’s a nice summary of his life here, and a tribute to him given the following month in the House of Representatives. Perhaps his family might one day donate his papers to the Library of Congress.