Double Life of Beryllium

This article is on the report for NASA Contract NAS9-13476 and the dual-use of beryllium research.

Rocketdyne, then a division of Rockwell International, played a central role in both NASA’s civil propulsion programs and the U.S. military’s advanced weapon initiatives during the Cold War. Beryllium, a lightweight metal with exceptional stiffness, high thermal conductivity, and low thermal expansion, was a recurring focus in its work. In 1973–1974, under NASA Johnson Space Center contract NAS9-13476, Rocketdyne engineers including key senior engineer R.D. Paster conducted a one-year program to evaluate the durability of a beryllium INTEREGEN rocket engine for the Space Shuttle’s Reaction Control System. The tests subjected engines to high-cycle hot-fires, severe off-nominal mixture ratios, vibration profiles simulating 100 missions, and environmental cycling. Publicly, the stated goal was to ensure that beryllium chamber assemblies and injector-to-chamber braze joints would survive shuttle service without maintenance. Technically, those same test conditions generated data directly applicable to other high-heat-flux systems far beyond civil propulsion.

Dual-use beryllium research

The properties that made beryllium attractive for rocket engines also made it ideal for high-energy laser (HEL) beam-director mirrors and structural elements in directed-energy weapons. In the same era, Rockwell’s Science Center worked on mounting and fabrication techniques for large beryllium optics, technology central to fast-steering mirrors and adaptive optics used in space-based and airborne lasers. Across the defense industry, the Air Force and other services were investing in beryllium mirrors for HEL systems because they can maintain optical figure under megawatt-class infrared flux. The precision machining, joining, and environmental control developed under NASA propulsion contracts paralleled the requirements for beryllium optical hardware—making the knowledge base inherently dual-use. Even without any classified crossover at the time, the civil-space R&D pipeline was producing materials expertise and thermal-management solutions the military could exploit with minimal adaptation.

The dual-use link extended beyond lasers to electromagnetic launchers. In a 1985 New York Times piece (‘Star Wars’ Technology: It’s More Than a Fantasy), Paster openly drew parallels between the heat loads in railgun rails and those in Shuttle Main Engine nozzles, noting that regenerative cooling lessons from the latter directly informed railgun survivability. This wasn’t accidental convergence—Rocketdyne had been, in his words, “involved in technology in that area for over 10 years.” That statement lines up with the timeline of NASA-funded beryllium durability work in the early 1970s and the rapid growth of Strategic Defense Initiative programs in the 1980s. Even if NAS9-13476 never mentioned lasers or railguns, the high-temperature metallurgy, joining techniques, and stress-life data it produced were immediately transferable to both. This is the technical “loophole”: the contracts specified a civil deliverable, but the outputs were broadly applicable to classified weapon programs without requiring new NASA authorization.

It’s important to note that in federal contracting, the legality hinges on scope and deliverables, not on whether the results can be used elsewhere. NAS9-13476 and the related hardware-heritage contracts (e.g., NAS9-12976, NAS9-12996 for valve components) were fulfilled as written for Shuttle RCS development. The testing did not need to reference space-based lasers or railguns to still be valuable to them; once the engineering data existed, the Department of Defense or Rockwell’s internal advanced programs could legally apply it to other systems. That’s why no smoking gun exists in the public contract language—the dual-use nature is baked into the physics and materials, not spelled out in the statement of work. This separation also allowed NASA to maintain its civilian image under the Outer Space Treaty, even while its contractors built capabilities relevant to space weaponry.

In sum, the beryllium rocket engine durability work that Paster oversaw sits at the nexus of civil and military technology. NASA funded it to solve a Shuttle propulsion problem, but the same beryllium processing, thermal-management, and structural design skills were exactly what SDI-era programs needed for high-energy lasers and railguns. Coupled with Rockwell’s simultaneous optics work and the timing of U.S. directed-energy investments, the case illustrates how Cold War aerospace contractors could develop militarily critical capabilities under the umbrella of civilian space research. The result was a body of engineering know-how that served two masters: one in the open, flying astronauts; the other behind classification walls, aiming beams and projectiles in the name of national defense.

United Nations Conference on Disarmament

In 1985, during remarks at the UN Conference on Disarmament, a Czechoslovak delegate cited a New York Times interview in which R.D. Paster—then Rocketdyne’s Vice President of Advanced Programs—stated that “Rocketdyne has been involved in technology in that area for over 10 years.” The delegate used Paster’s admission to challenge U.S. claims that Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) work was purely research-oriented, linking it to accelerated efforts to develop and test lasers and other directed-energy weapons in the early 1980s. Read in this context, Paster’s statement was already being leveraged internationally as evidence that the technical base for SDI predated its official launch, and that civil or dual-use aerospace work had been quietly building capabilities later relevant to space-based weapons—undercutting the public image of SDI as a sudden, standalone program.

Personal notes on author of report for NAS9-13476

I haven't spoken to my uncle Paster in years and last time I saw him was 17 years ago. He authored the report for NASA Contract NAS9-13476 for the public and had various other accomplishments.

In 1974, R. D. Paster, serving as a senior engineer at Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International, led technical analysis and testing under NASA Contract NAS9-13476 on the durability of beryllium rocket engines. He coordinated the research effort, integrated heritage hardware data, and oversaw the preparation of the project’s NASA Contractor Report. In this role, Paster bore responsibility for producing and releasing the official public disclosure of the work—an authoritative report catalogued by NASA’s Scientific and Technical Information program—which, while commissioned for civil space propulsion, documented material performance and engineering data that were later recognized as having dual-use physics applications.

R.D. Paster climbed from Rocketdyne propulsion leadership into the heart of U.S. strategic programs—first as president of Rocketdyne (c. 1989–94), then into Boeing after the Rockwell acquisition, where he’s quoted as president of Boeing Autonetics & Missile Systems (1997) and later vice president & general manager for Electronic Systems & Missile Defense (1998–99).

By 1997, as president of Boeing Autonetics & Missile Systems, R. D. Paster was shepherding precision strike and guidance work—publicly visible in the AGM-130 standoff missile upgrades (Autonetics was the system prime) and long-standing missile/ship guidance-control lines in Anaheim; these are classic precision-weapons, seekers, and flight-control programs. Within a year he’s quoted as vice president & GM, Electronic Systems & Missile Defense, front-and-center on the Minuteman III Guidance Replacement Program (ICBM life-extension) and a $1.3B USAF depot contract for ICBM/aircraft guidance repair—the kind of strategic-missile work that demands hardened sensors, inertial nav, and exquisite algorithms. In parallel, Boeing moved Guidance, Navigation & Sensors under its info-systems arm and pursued National Missile Defense as lead system integrator—the domain of threat-discrimination, command-and-control, and kill-vehicle integration, much of it classified. At the enterprise level, Boeing also led the Airborne Laser (ABL) team while TRW built the laser and Lockheed the nose turret—tying Paster’s electronics/missile-defense portfolio to contemporaneous directed-energy architectures that relied on adaptive optics and high-energy beam control (often with beryllium optics in the broader DEW ecosystem). Put together, the visible programs (AGM-130, Minuteman GRP, guidance depots) and the less-visible NMD/ABL integration layers map directly onto the most advanced, compartmented weapons of the era—where the public deliverable is “guidance upgrade” or “systems integration,” and the covert value is in sensor fusion, discrimination logic, hardened electronics, and beam-control tech that make those headline systems actually work.

Beryllium Declassified

Declassified U.S. government records, including the Department of Energy’s 2010 Declassification Determination (made with Department of Defense concurrence), state the general fact that beryllium is used in U.S. nuclear weapons, while its exact form, function, location, and purpose remain classified; earlier DOE declassification digests had likewise affirmed that the “mere fact” of beryllium’s use could be released without revealing engineering details. Beyond nuclear applications, beryllium’s combination of high stiffness-to-weight ratio, thermal stability, and favorable radiation interaction has led to confirmed use in aerospace programs such as the Lockheed A-12/SR-71 Blackbird (internal structural components) and the CORONA reconnaissance satellites (optical bench structures), and it is highly likely—though not officially confirmed—that it is also used in the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, given the aircraft’s demanding structural and thermal requirements.