The Hunt for Zero Point by Nick Cook

Author:Nick Cook [Cook, Nick]
Language: fra
Format: epub
Tags: Science / Alternative
Published: 2010-01-04T12:22:34+00:00

We drove in his car to the main gate, where our documentation was double-checked and triple-checked. It took an age before we were finally admitted to aerospace's inner sanctum.

Gordon's office was located in an administration block in the lee of the giant hangar. There was a low-slung building to the left of the gate and a cluster of busy-looking facilities to the right. These were the factories where the bulk of the company's classified work went on. The giant hangar was what you were meant to see. The real work went on in the buildings in its immense shadow.

I followed Lindeke to Gordon's office. The cool, low-lit atmosphere chilled the sweat on my back and I wondered what it must be like to work in this windowless environment all the time, day in, day out; and whether it was true, as the engineer had told Bill Scott, that they really didn't let you go once you were inducted.

We stepped into an office, as dimly lit as the corridor I had just left. A tall, powerfully built man got up from a table on the edge of the room. Jack Gordon, the fourth president of the Skunk Works, smiled hesitantly and shook my hand.

The Skunk Works and its dynastic leadership system was founded in 1943 by Kelly Johnson, a hugely talented, opinionated and irascible aerospace engineer, in response to an urgent U.S. Army Air Forces requirement for a jet fighter to counter the emergent threat of the Messerschmitt 262. The Me 262, a twin-jet swept-wing fighter-bomber of revolutionary performance, had recently been identified by Allied intelligence as being under development for the Luftwaffe. Johnson had long been badgering the Lockheed leadership for a special engineering department—small, agile and free of the overweening overheads and administrative baggage that encumbered technical progress in every large aerospace corporation (including Lockheed); and with the XP-80 project he finally got it. The XP-80 was built in just 143 days and, despite arriving too late for a showdown against the 262, went on to become an aviation classic.

The unorthodox methods Johnson pioneered to bring the XP-80 in on time and under budget—all the while under conditions of intense secrecy—set the standard for everything that followed. Ten years later, when the CIA drafted a requirement for a spyplane that could overfly the Soviet Union, it was Lockheed that came up with the solution. When the Agency needed an aircraft to surpass the performance ofthat aircraft, the glider-like U-2, again it was Lockheed that furnished the answer, this time with the extraordinarily graceful Mach 3 A-12 Blackbird. Like the U-2, the A-12 started as a black program, but gradually moved into the light, emerging finally as the USAF SR-71, the fastest operational aircraft in the world until its retirement in 1990. To this day, there is nothing faster, but that, of course, presupposes the "Aurora" stories aren't true.

Ben Rich, who succeeded Johnson in 1975, denied in his book Skunk Works, which serves as its semiofficial history, that Aurora ever existed.

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