Skunk Works

He sent me to a remote corner in the Lockheed complex, which had been during World War II a communal air raid shelter for hundreds of workers in the nearby B-17 bomber factory. Since then, it had been used to store bombs and bullets for our flight test division. It had eight-foot-thick walls and underground bunkers and was, I noticed, as far away as he could get from us in case something went wrong and we blew up. “Here’s what I want,” he told me. “I want to show the blue-suiters that working with liquid hydrogen is not so risky once you attain experience handling it. I want to prove that a damned Air Force airman can handle it as well as a Ben Rich.”

The reason he was mentioning the Air Force was that the CIA had quickly rejected the idea of building a hydrogen airplane as the successor to the U-2. Bissell had had his own bean counters estimate the development costs, which were in the $100 million range—too costly for the agency’s secret contingency funding, which bypassed the usual congressional appropriations committees. Even the CIA would find $100 million hard to hide. The Air Force, smarting for having to play a passive role in the U-2 Russian overflight operation, was receptive. The hydrogen airplane would put the blue-suiters in the driver’s seat for the next round of spy flights. Kelly had a promising preliminary discussion about the concept with the top Air Force brass involved with planning and development. They were eager to work with Kelly Johnson on just about anything involving Soviet overflight operations and decided to fund a feasibility study and begin the process of selecting a manufacturer to build a hydrogen-fueled engine.

I was a key player in the feasibility study. I had to prove that the fuel was safe and practical to produce in large batches. Kelly wanted me to try to create controlled explosions and fires in order to learn what we were up against. I requested Dave Robertson to help me. Davey was one of the shrewdest, most instinctive engineers I had ever known, with the right flair for these wild experiments.

Thank God my wife, Faye, had no inkling of how I was earning my paycheck in the late autumn of 1959. I remember huddling behind cement barricades with Robertson, trying to create a “controlled” explosion by rupturing tanks filled with liquid hydrogen under pressure. Nothing happened. The hydrogen just escaped into the atmosphere. So we set a charge and ignited it. Because of its low density the fireball quickly dissipated. The biggest bang, which knocked us four feet backwards, came when we mixed liquid oxygen with an equal amount of liquid hydrogen. The shock wave thudded against a huge hangar under construction about five hundred yards away and nearly knocked four workers off the scaffolding, while Davey and I huddled out of sight behind the cement wall, giggling like schoolboys.

One of our colleagues named our walled-in compound Fort Robertson because the guy and the place seemed perfectly mated, and the name stuck. We got Dr. Scott of the Bureau of Standards cleared to work with us as an adviser. The Fort Robertson complex was located less than a thousand yards from the Municipal Airport’s in-bound runway. And the first time Dr. Scott paid us a visit and saw the three tanks of liquid hydrogen holding hundreds of gallons under storage, his knees began to shake. “My God in heaven,” he exclaimed, “you’re gonna blow up Burbank.”

Scott came up with a brilliant idea. He suggested we substitute liquid nitrogen, which was less volatile and dangerous than liquid hydrogen, in our experiments as a safer substitute to test what might happen if we used liquid hydrogen under certain conditions. We made about twelve hundred gallons of liquid nitrogen. We made a martini in a dixie cup, then dipped a popsicle stick in the liquid nitrogen and used it to stir the martini. It became a popular taste treat for those cleared to visit us.

In less than three months, working with twelve Skunk Works shop workers and mechanics, we began producing more liquid hydrogen than any other place in the country—about two hundred gallons daily. We stored it in a ten-foot-high tank capable of pumping six hundred gallons a minute. We wore special grounded shoes and couldn’t carry keys or any other metallic objects that might spark. We installed a nonexplosive electrical system and used only nonsparking tools. Dave Robertson also invented a special hydrogen leak sniffer around the tanks that would immediately sound a klaxon horn warning that would send us running—probably for our lives.