MIT Lincoln Lab Quadulan radar dome bogie replacement

Tom's 1970s consulting case. Kwajalein radar dome (football-field-size dish, scientific instrument repurposed for monitoring Soviet boost-phase satellite launches) needed a bogie casting replaced; one-year casting lead time was unacceptable for a classified Cold War asset operating at 3000% of design life. Specifying NDT for a machined-from-plate substitute exposed the ASM standard that any defect fitting within a 12-inch circle is acceptable in plate above six inches — Tom's anchor for "defect size scales with casting size."

I remember one of my first consulting jobs back in the 70s, MIT Lincoln Lab came in and they said, we have this radar dome in Kwajalein in the Pacific. They had built this for some scientific purposes, but it just happened to be located in the perfect position. Whenever the Soviets were sending a satellite up into space from middle Asia, they could see, with this particular frequency of radar, the boost phase, and get a measure of the trajectory. They could figure out before it got into space what the orbit was going to be, because they could measure the arc of the rocket coming up out of the boost phase. It had been built for scientific purposes — it was about the size of a football field, the dish — and it ran around on big steel railroad tracks so it could spin 360°, take different views. It had big steel bogies that hold railroad wheels — I don't remember if it had eight or sixteen wheels on each bogie. If you've been in a shipyard you've seen big wheeled vehicles that carry 200-ton objects, pieces of ships. This was similar, except railroad-rail rather than rubber-tired wheels.