Skunk Works

8 BLOWING UP BURBANK

IN THE EARLY WINTER of 1956, Kelly sent for me, and I walked down the hall to his office with my heart in my throat. I feared he was sending me back to the main plant with a handshake and goodbye. “Close the door,” he said.

I sat down opposite his desk like a condemned man sensing the verdict.

“Rich,” he asked, “what do you know about cryogenics?”

I shrugged. “Not much since college chemistry days.”

“I want you to read up thoroughly on all those exotic fuels, especially on liquid hydrogen, and then get back to me and we’ll talk some more. Keep your damn mouth shut about this. Tell no one.”

When Kelly had tapped me for this assignment, the first thing I had done was to check the reference to liquid hydrogen in my copy of Mark’s Mechanical Engineering Handbook, the engineer’s bible, which told me what I already thought I knew—liquid hydrogen had no real practical application because it was so dangerous to store and handle. It was a mere laboratory curiosity. I read that definition to Kelly Johnson and told him that I happened to agree. Kelly’s face reddened—a storm was rising. “Goddam it, Rich, I don’t care what in hell that book says or what you happen to think. Liquid hydrogen is the same as steam. What is steam? Condensed water. Hydrogen plus oxygen produces water. That’s all that liquid hydrogen really is. Now, get out there and do the job for me.”

Over the next few weeks I was living a boyhood fantasy and traveling around the country pretending to be a secret agent, using my Skunk Works alias of “Ben Dover,” in the best traditions of trench-coated operatives. Kelly had warned me not to reveal that I worked at the Skunk Works to anyone I visited. I pretended to be a self-employed thermodynamicist trying to learn as much as I could about liquid hydrogen for an investment group studying the possibilities of a hydrogen airplane engine. I was consulting with hydrogen experts around the country to find out how we could make our own liquid hydrogen safely and cheaply in large batches to fuel Kelly’s latest dream. He was thinking about building a liquid hydrogen-powered spy plane as the successor to the U-2, giving us twenty times the thrust and power of a conventionally powered airplane. We’d be practically a space vehicle, whisking above 100,000 feet across the sky at more than twice the speed of sound. The entire Russian defense system would fall into a state of catatonic disbelief, mistaking us for a streaking comet. “I want answers, not excuses about why we can’t do this,” Kelly told me and shoved me out the door.

Which is why I showed up as Mr. Ben Dover at Boulder, Colorado, where the U.S. Bureau of Standards maintained a cryogenic laboratory under the direction of Dr. Russell Scott, recognized as the world’s expert on handling and storing liquid hydrogen. When I told him I wanted to learn how to handle liquid hydrogen in large amounts—like maybe running my own tank farm—the blood drained from Scott’s face. “Mr. Dover,” he said, “this stuff is volatile. One tank car could blow up an entire shopping mall. Do you have any notion of the risks?”

My fact finding took me into the dark and gloomy basement of the chemistry building at Berkeley, where Nobel Laureate William Giauque held forth from a reinforced basement bunker doing his prize-winning experiments on low temperature research. I couldn’t help noticing some holes punched in the walls, courtesy of errant handling of small teacup amounts of liquid hydrogen by student lab assistants. “Handle with extreme care, Mr. Dover,” Professor Giauque warned me. “That’s why they keep me stashed away in this dungeon.” When I told him that I wanted to learn how to make liquid hydrogen and store it in the hundreds of gallons, the professor shook his head solemnly. “With all due respect, sir, I think you’ve got a screw loose.”

I wanted to protest: “Not me, Prof, but that lunatic I work for.”

Actually, the idea of using hydrogen as a propellant had been kicking around since the end of World War II, primarily to fuel rocket engines, simply because its volatility created tremendous thrust. But Kelly wasn’t thinking of a rocket engine; he wanted a conventional jet engine fueled by liquid hydrogen that could cruise for hours above Mach 2. Rocket engines were indeed like comets—blazing into the sky for a minute or two before extinguishing. As a hard-nosed businessman Kelly was not about to commit to building such an airplane unless he felt assured that we could produce sufficient supplies of fuel and learn how to handle it safely. So when I returned to Burbank armed with blueprints and technical manuals, Kelly smiled upon me benevolently and told me I was in charge of building our own hydrogen liquefaction plant.