Skunk Works

The firemen saw the fog and went running for their gas masks. Had they known we were playing around with liquid hydrogen so close to Burbank Airport, I’m sure they would have had my scalp, but they put out the fire in two minutes and went away, no questions asked. But Kelly was cranky with me. “Goddam it, Rich, why in hell did you use a damned wooden-framed stove? That was just asking for trouble.” I told him he was nickel-and-diming me so severely on this project that a wooden-framed stove was all I could afford. He couldn’t argue.

God knows how many hours I spent as part of a small team sitting in Kelly’s office, reviewing all our data and trying desperately to pull a few range-extending tricks out of the bag. We knew damned well what the problems were. We missed our lift-over-drag ratio by 16 percent from what we originally had estimated, and our specific fuel consumption was disappointing too. We thought we would be able to achieve one-fifth the fuel consumption of a standard kerosene-fueled engine at Mach 2.5. Instead we were able to achieve only one-fourth the fuel consumption—not good enough to get us where we needed to go and back.

The only way to extend range was by improving fuel consumption, adding more fuel storage capacity and improving lift over drag to make the airplane fly more efficiently. We had done all that we could in each of these critical areas and were still a thousand miles short of our guarantee to the Air Force. Since I was his “expert” on the exotic fuel, Kelly asked for my opinion. I said, “Two thousand miles will only get us from Los Angeles to Omaha. We would have to land at a base that stored liquid hydrogen for us to refuel. Air-to-air refueling is out, so we would need strategically placed liquid hydrogen tank farms in Europe and Asia to refuel our airplane on its flights over Russia, leaving us with the nightmare problems of logistics and handling of a touchy, volatile fuel. Right now, we are having huge headaches shipping in our special fuel to our U-2 base in Turkey and that does not require special refrigeration and expert handling.”

Kelly sighed and said he agreed with me.

He picked up the phone and called Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas Jr. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m building you a dog. My recommendation is that we cancel Suntan and send you back your money as soon as possible. We don’t have the range to justify this project.”

It look several Pentagon meetings with Kelly before the Air Force reluctantly agreed with him. We had spent about $6 million in development costs and returned $90 million to the government. The punch line to the story is this: not long after the contract was canceled, the Soviets launched their Sputnik 1 into orbit. The rocket engine that had carried it into space was hydrogen-fueled. The engine builder was Pyotr Kapitsa, who had been released from the gulag not to build an airplane but to launch Sputnik.

We had all guessed wrong.

But our exercise on the hydrogen airplane was not a total waste. General Dynamics was working on a hydrogen-powered rocket called Centaur; so we turned over to them all our cryostats and liquid hydrogen pumps. We in the Skunk Works had proved to ourselves that we could develop a large supersonic airplane and engine. Even before Powers was shot down, Kelly had determined that we would need to make a quantum leap in technology in order to keep our spy planes operational over Russia. Within months we would be planning a technological marvel called the Blackbird as successor to the U-2. Once again we’d be teamed with Dick Bissell and the CIA and challenged to produce a new miracle.

Postscript on the U-2

All through the escapades involving the hydrogen airplane, the main occupation inside the Skunk Works was maintaining the production line of new U-2s. Many Americans believe that the U-2 died the day that Powers was shot down. The CIA did in fact close down its secret bases overseas and come home, but we had sold more than twenty U-2s to the Air Force back in the late 1950s and more than twice that number since then, and there never has been a single day since that airplane became operational in 1956 that a U-2 isn’t flying somewhere in the world on a surveillance operation for the blue-suiters, NASA, or the Drug Enforcement Agency. In fact, on more than one occasion over the years, the U-2 may have saved the world from thermonuclear war.