Posted on 02/01/2010 8:13:08 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
The name of the super-secret project was Suntan. It was to be the ultimate reconnaissance airplane, flying so high and so fast—it was to cruise above 100,000 feet at Mach 2—that detection would be unlikely and interception impossible. But it also would have been a giant winged thermos bottle, with a fuel tank full of liquid hydrogen at –400 degrees Fahrenheit and its outer skin baking at 350 degrees or more. A proposed hydrogen liquefaction plant dedicated to producing fuel for several of the airplanes would have sucked up 10 percent of the natural gas supply of Los Angeles in two years. Flying the highly unstable and explosive liquid to the airplanes’ bases would have required a fleet of heavy transports. An accident with one of the transports would have made the Hindenburg disaster look like a campfire.
It was too much, even for the formidable head of Lockheed’s Hogwarts-like Skunk Works. Kelly Johnson had accepted the U.S. Air Force challenge in 1956 with his customary take-no-prisoners determination; now, two years later, he had changed his mind, and he told the Air Force that he thought the program ought to be scrapped.
And so it was. If Kelly Johnson couldn’t do it, the Pentagon reasoned, it couldn’t be done.
Clarence Leonard Johnson was born in 1910, the seventh of nine children, in Ishpeming, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His family, Swedish immigrants, was poor; their lives were only a step or two above those of frontiersmen. His mother took in laundry and the young Clarence sometimes delivered the wash on his wagon or sled.
(Excerpt) Read more at airspacemag.com ...
my dad worked under Johnson at the Skunk Works
My grandfather worked at the “Skunk Works” as an engineer.
Very interesting article. Thanks for posting it!
I propose a toast !
To the Skunk Works !
To Kelly!
Really great post.
Thanks.
God knows what they may have that we don't have a clue of!!
Kelly Johnson was, like John Browning, an American genius whose designs are ageless.
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