Reverse Engineering The Stealth Bomber

[Husky_Khan]

Not about China thankfully.

It's been twenty one years since the last B2 Stealth Bomber rolled off of the assembly line (and 1989 when it took its first flight) so naturally things could get lost over the intervening decades, like this below:

“This engineering effort is to reverse engineer the core of the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers, develop disassembly process to remove defective cores, develop a stacking, vacuum brazing, and welding process to manufacture new heat exchanger cores and to develop a welding process to install the new cores on existing B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The requirement includes reverse-engineering the re‐core process for the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The B‐2 Load Heat Exchanger (NSN 1660‐01‐350‐8209FW) uses air and Ethylene Glycol Water (EGW) liquid to produce cold air for the cooling system.”

The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber

Twenty-one years after the last Spirit was delivered, the Air Force is working out how to build the exotic spare parts the bomber requires.

www.thedrive.com

 

[PsihoKekec]

They had to do something similar for parts of the Minuteman III missiles.

 

[Zachowon]

I saw people talking shit about this, and then I realized a lot of the people currently working on them might not have been born yet by the time they were produced

 

[Captain X]

You would think they'd have kept that info somewhere...

 

[Zachowon]

You would think they'd have kept that info somewhere...

Things get lost. Especially since the people who BUILT the aircraft would be the ones keeping them. Perhaps misplaced when they stopped building

 

[PsihoKekec]

You would think they'd have kept that info somewhere...

They surely had, but since it was a classified data, a relatively few copies must have been made, so when medium becomes unreadable there just might not be a still readable backup copy. And keep in mind that this is only publicised tip of the iceberg, there is a lot more of mundane knowledge and information that gets lost due to outdated information keeping.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Note also that even when you keep records of how to make something, inevitably the writers forget to add some vital piece of information because in their mind that's "common knowledge." Unfortunately this is impossible to avoid as nobody can fit every imaginable detail into their work and nobody can foresee which details are going to quit being common knowledge later.

We lost the method of making Roman Concrete for no few centuries because the Romans thought it was obvious you'd use seawater instead of freshwater to make it. Pliny the Elder even wrote that bit down, stating that everyday exposed to the ocean it became everyday stronger, but people reading it later thought he was just being poetic instead of literal. We only rediscovered how their "lasts 2,000+ years" concrete was made in modern times due to nobody remembering that yes, when building a marine concrete structure use marine water.

 

[prinCZess]

Saw this earlier today myself, and my first half-ironic and half-shameful thought, was that the various future-fiction universes that handwave a decline in technological knowledge (WH40K, Battletech) were vindicated. Doubly-so, perhaps, when it's the HEAT EXCHANGERS that went bad (hello Battletech) on the MACHINE named SPIRIT. Omnissiah clearly displeased.

Being more serious and turning down my own stupidity (as much as is possible, anyways), I'd suspect some degree of this is headline-y, clickbait-y styling more-so than 'serious' loss-of-capability. The long development/production process and funding-juggling the B-2s went through, just how presumably complex the systems are in comparison to something like the B-52 where this kind of 'reverse engineering' need would look really ridiculous, and then general paperwork and organizational losses from Northrop and Grumman tying the knot in the 90s and all related juggling there all come together to make for reasonable explanation for why some of this might have been lost to time.

Also the possibility that the article's author is reading too-much into the engineering effort explanation that's offered--as he alludes to himself, modeling parts and processes for new production capacities like 3-d printing could be the relevant item here...Or, more tinfoil hat-y but plausible could be an effort to get an 'independent audit' or conception of some component production that might be for just the B-2s maintanence or might be expanded for the AF's newer, shinier bombers that are being developed (*tinfoil hat on* or already exist).

 

[Arlos]

You would think they'd have kept that info somewhere...

You‘d be surprised at what get lost sometime...As an example, by the time WW1 came around my country France didn’t know how to make its main infantry rifle anymore(They only found out when they suddenly needed a ton of infantry rifle...).
All it take is someone not looking into it for some time (Usually because everyone assume there’s absolutely no way something that important could be lost) and poof, the knowledge disappears.

 

[Zachowon]

Saw this earlier today myself, and my first half-ironic and half-shameful thought, was that the various future-fiction universes that handwave a decline in technological knowledge (WH40K, Battletech) were vindicated. Doubly-so, perhaps, when it's the HEAT EXCHANGERS that went bad (hello Battletech) on the MACHINE named SPIRIT. Omnissiah clearly displeased.

Being more serious and turning down my own stupidity (as much as is possible, anyways), I'd suspect some degree of this is headline-y, clickbait-y styling more-so than 'serious' loss-of-capability. The long development/production process and funding-juggling the B-2s went through, just how presumably complex the systems are in comparison to something like the B-52 where this kind of 'reverse engineering' need would look really ridiculous, and then general paperwork and organizational losses from Northrop and Grumman tying the knot in the 90s and all related juggling there all come together to make for reasonable explanation for why some of this might have been lost to time.

Also the possibility that the article's author is reading too-much into the engineering effort explanation that's offered--as he alludes to himself, modeling parts and processes for new production capacities like 3-d printing could be the relevant item here...Or, more tinfoil hat-y but plausible could be an effort to get an 'independent audit' or conception of some component production that might be for just the B-2s maintanence or might be expanded for the AF's newer, shinier bombers that are being developed (*tinfoil hat on* or already exist).

They are making the B21 so that may be why they want to get it back

 

[paulobrito]

Backups can be corrupt / lost. People that have the required skill set / know-how retired / die. You see it several times.
On top of that, many times the info on the plans / blueprints is not how the things are done - case in point the Saturn V.
So, yes, losing tech is very possible.

 

[Doomsought]

Its not exactly the technology that we lost, it is the engineering. We have plenty of heat exchanges, just not the specific type that is needed.

 

[Laskar]

You would think they'd have kept that info somewhere...

Sometimes, they didn't have all the info to begin with. When the US military tried to replicate Fogbank, it took them years and millions of dollars of R&D, even though the engineering drawings were retained. There was an impurity introduced during the manufacturing process that wasn't appreciated by the original engineers, so the military chased its tail trying to figure out why the new batch wasn't as good as the old production run.

In this case... it's a heat exchanger, and not one of the exotic crystalline-polymer ones manufactured in microgravity factories. Shouldn't take too long to produce a new batch.