Skunk Works

I admit that being extremely careful about how we spent our time and limited resources was easier when profits were high and our workforce fully engaged. But I also turned back bucks when business was lousy too. For example, during one very slack period in the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was ready to sign up the Skunk Works on a three-year feasibility study for developing a hypersonic airplane, which, by definition, meant an aircraft capable of flying faster than five times the speed of sound. The Reagan science advisers were proposing an airplane that flew at Mach 12 and offered me a million dollars per Mach number to show them how it could be done. The trouble was that I couldn’t design such a vehicle if they offered me twelve billion. That project was nothing but a simple-minded boondoggle from start to finish.

President Reagan had proposed a national hypersonic plane project during a televised address. The way he described it, Flash Gordon might have been his speechwriter. The vehicle, a commercial passenger plane, would take off from a regular airport runway, climb above the stratosphere into space, then, as an intercontinental rocket vehicle, blast into orbit, before gradually descending like a regular airliner to a distant airport. Reagan called the hypersonic plane “The Orient Express” because it would fly from New York to Tokyo in only two hours. Reagan wanted to build it in four to eight years. He’d be lucky to do it in fifty.

I was outraged by that speech—not at the president, but at his technical team, which apparently had sold him a hypersonic version of the Brooklyn Bridge. I phoned Reagan’s chief science adviser at the White House, Jay Keyworth, and told him the idea was utterly absurd. I reminded Keyworth of the enormous problems we had encountered building the Blackbird, which flew “only” at Mach 3.2. I said to him, “Do you know what would’ve happened if we tried to fly much faster than that? The airplane’s surface would have come apart from heat friction. And that was titanium. Do you have something stronger? And by the way, our crew wore space suits and we still worried about boiling them alive if our air-conditioning system failed. And you are proposing to fly at Mach 12, where the surface heat on the fuselage would be 2,500 degrees and still have a passenger cabin filled with women, children, and businessmen, sitting around in their shirtsleeves! Not in my lifetime. Nor in yours.” I told Keyworth, “Whoever dreamed up that presidential address ought to be canned. I’m not at all certain we would have that kind of technology ready by the middle of the damned twenty-first century, and if you don’t realize that, you are in the wrong business.”

But the lure of building a hypersonic airplane dies hard and has become fool’s gold to aerospace dreamers. The idea is still kicking around in Congress, its proponents in search of funding like a stray dog sniffing around for a bone. Building the airplane, to be called the X-30, will be a joint project of NASA and the Defense Department. But long before the first serious dollar is plonked down, someone in charge had better realize that Reagan’s “Orient Express” is really two separate concepts—one a rocketship and the other an airplane. Most likely, that particular twain shall never meet successfully.

Do the virtuous get their just rewards? The short answer is not if they’re dealing with the Pentagon on a regular basis. I had thought, for example, that because the Skunk Works had performed so brilliantly in developing the Stealth F-117A fighter in the mid-1970s that we had earned post position on the inside track for a new stealth bomber. To me, that was a logical evolution from one highly successful program to another. Events not only would prove me wrong, but would lead to the most costly debacle in the history of the defense industry.

I began with the best of intentions: to interest the blue-suiters in a stealth bomber that could carry out a mission over the most heavily defended targets. I made my pitch at the Pentagon one spring day in 1978, during lunch with two of the sharpest people in the business—Gene Fubini, head of the Defense Science Board, and Defense Under Secretary Bill Perry, who was the Carter administration’s czar of research and development and godfather of our stealth fighter program. Perry’s boss, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, had given him control over stealth. Both Bill and Gene were really depressed over the costly delays and poor testing of Rockwell’s new B-l bomber, built to replace the Strategic Air Command’s aging B-52 bomber fleet, but which had the look and feel of a lemon.