uh oh, high energy jokes
here’s what I could find
Back in the late 50s there was a new guided missile being developed called the “Snark.” The USAF wanted to launch them quickly and to demonstrate this capabilitiy, they arranged for a show to the media of this new capability. The Snark was interesting for launching, because it had a small solid rocket motor that would initiate the launch, following by the ignition of the main engine.
When the time came, news media people from all over showed up. The first launch looked good, as the SRM shot the rocket off the pad and over the Atlantic. However, the main engine failed to ignite, and the SNARK went into the water. They had a 30-mins turn around time, so a half-hour later, a second Snark rose up into the air, pushed skyward by its SRM. As you can already guess, the main engine failed and the missile went into the drink. Thirty minutes later, the same episode was replayed a third time.
The New York Times reporter led his article off with this statement:
If you are going on vacation to Florida, stay away from Cocoa Beach; because they now have Snark-infested waters! lol
I’ll confess I don’t know much about LENR gadgets, and that I’m very skeptical about all claims cats can deviate from the standard model and produce excess energy, but back in the 1950s I was a Snark launch crew member, so I know a lot about Snarks. The phrase “Snark infested waters” was indeed sometimes used, but not for the reason you describe.
Snark was a big, long-range, 3.8 MT warhead, subsonic, SAC stealth cruise missile, powered by a slightly modified Pratt J-57 turbojet engine; basically the same engine powered the numerous F-100 fighters and B-52 bombers. At launch, the Snark main engine was always running at full stable power, just as though it were in a F-100 beginning its runway takeoff roll. In fact, the booster rockets were inhibited from firing until the main J-57 engine was developing full and stable thrust. Main engine failures were no more common in Snark than in F-100 Super Sabers. Very rare in Snark. Snark was deployed on mobile launch trailers. Two giant JATO solid rockets blasted the Snark off the launch trailer and boosted it to a speed where aerodynamic lift prevailed, then the rocket boosters fell away. Launch failures were relatively rare. But Snark had serious problems with its vacuum tube flight control and guidance systems. The shock of launch played hob on the tubes, and often within only a few minutes of launch, flight control and guidance system failures would set in resulting in eventual big disappointing down-range splashes. Snark’s extended range mission requirement, which dictated that the aerodynamic drag be as low as possible, compounded the problem. To reduce drag and extend range, Snark had no rudder or horizontal stabilizer and only minimal area elevon flight control surfaces. That is to say, stable flight required a fully functioning flight control system; in way too many instances Snark just didn’t have that.
Most launches resulted in Snark flying several hundred, or maybe even several thousand, miles down range before crashing. But the problem was almost always the vacuum tubes failing. Had large-scale solid-state integrated circuits been available back then to implement reliable guidance and flight control systems, the Snark program would have been technically highly successful. Ironically, the higher powers were fed-up with the many test flight failures, and wrote-off the multi billion dollar Snark program just about the time perfectly reliable solid-state circuits became available.