Skunk Works

KELLY JOHNSON’S disappointment over our failure to produce a workable hydrogen-powered airplane had him pouting for a day or two, but he quickly recovered and began lobbying the CIA for a new spy plane to fly over Russia that would be a quantum leap over the U-2 in every way. He assembled the small group of us who had worked on the hydrogen plane and had us brainstorming ideas for new designs and approaches for an airplane that used conventional engines and fuel but still could outrace any Russian missile. “It makes no sense,” he said, “to just take this one or two steps ahead, because we’d be buying only a couple of years before the Russians would be able to nail us again. No, I want us to come up with an airplane that can rule the skies for a decade or more.”

At that point, in April 1958, the U-2 overflights of Russia were in their second year and going well. In fact, it would be two more years before Francis Gary Powers was shot down, and the high priority at the Skunk Works was Operation Rainbow, our attempt to lower the U-2’s radar cross section. But Kelly declared the U-2 doomed. The Russians had made it a matter of national honor to find a way to stop U-2 overflights and were investing billions of rubles in rushing to develop a missile system to do so. Dick Bissell shared Kelly’s glum outlook for the U-2’s future and encouraged him to begin sketching out a successor spy plane. “We’ll fly at ninety thousand feet, and jack up the speed to Mach 3. It will have a range of four thousand miles,” Kelly told a group of us. “The higher and faster we fly the harder it will be to spot us, much less stop us.”

I didn’t know about Richard Bissell of the CIA, but Ben Rich of the Skunk Works reacted to Kelly’s idea with jaw-dropping disbelief. He was proposing to build an airplane that would fly not only four times faster than the U-2 but five miles higher—and the U-2 was then the current high-altitude champion of the skies. A Mach 3 airplane was 60 percent faster than the maximum dash capability of our top-performance jet fighter. Experimental rocket airplanes had flown at blinding Mach 3 speed using powerful thrusters for two or three minutes at a time until fuel ran out. But Kelly was proposing an airplane to cruise at more than three times the speed of sound, that could fly coast to coast in less than an hour on one tank of gas.

Kelly’s audacious idea would probably not have been taken seriously by the CIA coming from anyone other than the boss of the Skunk Works. After all, in 1954 we had built the F-104 Starfighter, the world’s first Mach 2 fighter. So a Mach 3 airplane seemed a logical extension of our skills. However, there was a Grand Canyon–size gulf between designing an airplane like the F-104 that could kick in its afterburners on takeoffs and in dash modes lasting a minute or two, and designing an airplane whose “normal” cruising speed was nearly twice as fast as the fastest fighter’s dash speed. On afterburners, a fighter was burning fuel at a rate four times faster than at cruise speed, so afterburners were saved for combat threat situations—escaping flak after a bombing run or outflying missiles or dogfighting MiGs. We were proposing to fly whole missions on afterburners. The technology confronting us was so far beyond anything on the drawing boards of any other aerospace company in the world that we might as well have been proposing commuter rocket service between the moon and the outer ring of planets.

For openers, to be able to fly sustained at such heights and speeds would require radical departures in how we designed and built propulsion systems.

“Rich,” Kelly said, turning my way, “I’m making you program manager for the propulsion system.” He ignored my stunned expression. “How hot do you suppose the airplane will get at Mach 3 in sustained flight?” he asked me. “Somewhere between a blowtorch and a soldering iron, I guess,” I replied when my voice returned. He nodded. “Probably around nine hundred degrees at the nose,” he said. “Just imagine that kind of thrust! You’re the lucky one. You’ll at least have known laws of physics to guide you. The rest of us are going to have to do some fancy stretching to find out what can work. We start from scratch as if we are building the first airplane, just like the Wright brothers.”

If I had been older and smarter, I would’ve run for the nearest exit. I had to produce a propulsion system more efficient than any other ever designed. I was then only a thirty-two-year-old fledgling, still on probation to prove my worth as a propulsion and thermodynamics engineer among many of my senior colleagues. But I was cocky enough to shrug off Kelly’s challenge and think, A Mach 3 airplane! Why in hell not? Kelly surrounded himself only with the kind of can-do guys that made American aerospace technology preeminent. To him, the word “impossible” was a gross insult.