Right after he got his master’s degree, Brown went to White Sands Missile Range to oversee testing of three of the Army’s missile systems. It was located just over a mountain pass, about forty miles from New Mexico State. Before he arrived, the testing at White Sands had revealed a horrible problem with the Littlejohn missile. Every tenth missile or so would fall several miles short. Of course, it was intolerable to have a nuclear weapon miss its target by a couple of miles, especially falling short, because it might fall on the heads of your own troops.
At the time, the Littlejohn missile was the Army’s best hope of blunting a Soviet attack. This was the early 1960s, and tensions in Europe were mounting. Something had to be done to keep Russian tanks from rolling across Germany. And it seemed that the Littlejohn would keep them at bay. But until the “short round” problem was fixed, the missile could not be used. Over the last two years the Army had spent millions of dollars trying to figure out the cause of the short rounds. All the civilian scientists and engineers that had been called in to help were baffled. It seemed that millions more would be needed for testing different possible causes.
One morning Brown was on the firing range a few hours early because he was in charge of firing that day. He noticed two men setting up an elaborate camera system. Out of curiosity, he went over to talk to them and found that they were part of a civilian engineering firm that was developing a new type of camera. They explained their photographic technique to Brown and invited him to come by their office and look around.
A few weeks later, he walked by their office and remembered their invitation to stop by. As they were showing him around, they mentioned in passing that something strange had shown up on the film they took that day—some fuzzy stuff was below the missile.
Brown asked them to enlarge the picture. He took into account the distortion from the experimental film and was able to calculate the size of the largest fragment of the fuzzy stuff. It was a hexagonal nut that must have fallen from the missile’s shoe. The shoe was a big block of metal that guided the missile along the launch rail. When the missile ignited and shot off the rail, the shoe was supposed to kick off.
He called his office and had them look in the records to find out whether anything strange had happened that day. It turned out that the photographed missile was one of the short rounds. As he walked back to his office, he wondered what the relationship between a short round and a missing nut was. Brown called in his chief engineer, who explained how losing the nut would keep the missile’s shoe on. If the nut were missing, the spring that ejected the shoe wouldn’t activate. The shoe would stay attached. Brown thought maybe the missile was carrying this shoe downrange, causing the missile to fall several miles short of its target.
He had his office look back at the records of the recovery crew to see whether shoes had been found for the short rounds. (Shoes were generally found about a hundred feet downrange whenever the missile flew correctly.)
Just as he thought, whenever there was a short round, they didn’t find a shoe.
The next day Brown had a crew dig the short round out of the ground at the point of impact. Was the shoe still attached? No. But everyone could see the hole in the missile’s skin where the shoe had been attached. It had been ripped by the great aerodynamic forces that tore the shoe off during flight.
So in less than two days, Brown solved the problem, and the two-year testing program was terminated. He had found that when the Littlejohn missile was shipped in a crate from the manufacturing plant, vibrations sometimes loosened the nut. If the nut fell off, the shoe didn’t eject. The missile then had to carry this nonstreamlined hunk of metal downrange, and the extra drag caused the Littlejohn to fall miles short.
The fix was so simple that it cost less than a nickel per missile. When the nut was screwed on at the manufacturing plant, they had to make sure it could never come loose. They took a hammer and “pinged” the nut so that it was permanently attached. As a double check, launch crews checked the shoe and its nut just before launch.
The Littlejohn missile was returned to the troops in Europe immediately. Brown didn’t think much about solving the short round problem because it happened so fast. But his superiors noticed how quickly he had solved this problem that had stumped the best engineers for two years. And they saw that he had saved the Army a good deal of money. The short round incident went on his Officer Efficiency Report and the Army would later reward him with an early promotion to Major.