TechStuff Classic: Sniffing Out Skunk Works Part Two

that out, because this is Sniffing Out Skunk Works Part two. Yeah. I was really creative with the titles back then, but we will continue to hear about the fascinating work done at this top secret R and D facility. Let's listen in all right, let's move on to what was our timeline? Right, that was where we left off. Yeah, we were right about to get to the sun Town. Yeah. Which that's something that Lauren and I know a lot about seeing is how we're both such a translucent are Empire people.

We we are the ones who hiss when the sun comes out. But the sun tan does not refer to anyone designed to you know, get an actual tan. That's not That's not what this is about. I believe it was so named. I imagine it was so named because it was a very high flying vehicle and also it was using liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen very important with sun right, Yeah, hydrogens turned into helium the temperature of millions of degrees to do. So, yeah, it's it was meant to be

a spy plane. So it was a sun the Sun Tan was a spy plane that would fly on liquid hydrogen as its fuel. And um, as it turns out, that's that's kind of scary to develop because I don't know if you know this, but hydrogen tends to be a volatile substance. Let's say. Yes, this project came about because of photos from a YouTube mission over Soviet Russia of hydrogen liquefication plants, and they were afraid that that.

The U. S. Government was afraid that the USSR was building a plane that could spy better than the YouTube. And we just can't have any of that. We could not have that, so says gunk Works was given nineties six million dollars to design their own hydrogen powered plane. So you just imagine this the early days of testing

your liquid hydrogen production system. Uh, you you go to work in a bomb shelter, the walls of which are eight feet thick in case you happened to blow yourself up real good while you're working with liquid hydrogen, so that you don't blow your neighbors up real good as well. Really builds confidence. So the facility ended up investing in lots of stuff so that they could avoid any possible flames,

including all of the tools were non sparking. You weren't allowed to carry your keys in your pockets to avoid any potential sparks. You had to have grounded boots so that you wouldn't create an electro statics charge. It was really really important, and they did pretty well up until they had a tiny, itsy bitsy fire. It was it was a stove fire. It wasn't it wasn't really that big, you know, and it but it took place like seven

feet away from the main hydrogen tank. Yeah, which absolutely terrifying. I can't imagine what my reaction would be, nor can I imagine what my reaction would be when I found out the next thing that happened. Because this project was top secret, they wouldn't let firefighters into the building to control the flames, right, and they could not get the flames out with fire extinguishers. They had gone beyond that that level, and yet they could not also allow firefighters

in because this top secret. They did wind up, I mean, nothing exploded, turned out to be okay, Um, California is still there, so it didn't go boom. But but here's the things that the it really illustrated that that accident illustrate how potentially dangerous this this project was. And so because of its level of risk, it was decided that it was too much for lockeed to endure, and so

they scrapped the project. Yeah. Also, Kelly A. Johnson, who we mentioned in the previous episode wasn't personally sure whether these hydrogen engines were going to be able to go faster further than a conventional kerosene burning jet, and so you know, the final decision was, like, here's your ninety million of the original ninety six back US government. We don't want to blow things up like one. We cannot.

We can't guarantee that it's going to perform at what we hope it will, and too, we can't guarantee it won't explode. So as an interesting side note, part of what spurred all this interest in liquid hydrogen was was also the CIA's discovery that Soviet scientists named Peter Kapista Yes had been taken out of a Soviet labor camp and put into a research institute. Um he he was.

He was a specialist in in low pressure liquids, and it had turned out that he was working on the Sputnik for which he would win the Noble Prize, in which we also refer to as the Satellite that Went Deep. And that's pretty much all it did apart from terrify an entire country. It also did that from kicking off a whole new section at the Cold War that we

like to call the Space Race. Yeah, but that that'll that'll that'll play in a little bit with Lockheed, although really skunk Works had very limited UH operations with the Space Race, although some of the people who would test fly some of their jets would end up walking on the freaking move and NASA would continue to use some of their vehicles in testing exactly so May nineteen sixty, a very important event happened, not directly related to Lockheed,

but something that would would end up impacting them down the line. That was when the United States pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down. He was flying a YouTube plane over Russia. Um he was shot down after I think they fired something like seven or eight missiles at him, and they also had a MiG in pursuit. The MiG got hit by one of the missiles and was destroyed. Um and Uh and Power said that he saw another

parachute open after he had to eject. He actually could have bailed earlier, but stayed in his plane to make sure that would crash in an unpopulated forest area as opposed to crashing in a town, and he ejected from his plane. He landed safely. He was captured by the Soviet Union and sentenced to three years in prison, followed by seven years hard labor, so ten years total. He would not have to serve out all that time. In nineteen sixty two, he was part of a prisoner exchange

along with another Soviet prisoner and Uh. He was exchanged for Colonel William Fisher uh It was a Soviet KGB colonel. On every tenth nineteen sixty two in Berlin, so he would return home. He was He was faced with lots of criticism, people who said that he should have activated a a self destruct mechanism that would have destroyed the equipment aboard the You two so that the Soviets couldn't

get in charge of it. Some people said that he should have taken the c I a cyanide pill and committed suicide rather than be taken captured by the Soviets. It's your job or something. Yeah, he was eventually like the Officially people said, you did exactly what you were supposed to do, but he faced a lot of criticism at home. Um. This this also sparked discussions about needs

for for better spy plane. Yes, something has to replace the YouTube because remember the You two had been launched the previous decade, and so you know clearly you don't want to have that spy plane flying ten years later. I say, as the You two is currently flying right now, more than fifty years after. Yeah, so um this the the new project would be called the Youth three. Yeah, originally that was the original designation. They of course would change that, but that was what they first called it.

And uh, this is also when I wanted to take a little side note to talk about what it's like to work at Lockheed, because I was reading an article that had an interview with Edward Lovick, who was a retired he retired Locke to employee, and he was a radar expert. And the reason why I bring him up now is because this is about when Lockeeds started looking into ways to make planes harder to detect. So one of the ways of making a better spy plane is making one that can't be seen by radar or ground

or whatever. And so Lovick, who was probably one of the leading experts in radar at the time, simply he says, because he just started playing with it earlier than most people were. Um, he was very instrumental in trying to figure out what would make a plane harder to see by radar, and it took a while for them to figure this out. He talked about the fact that he would go with Kelly Johnson to some of these meetings

with the CIA. And by the way, at that time, Lockheed was referring to the CIA as quote the customer end quote, which I thought was a great way of putting it. And he said that right before lockeed got the new spy plane contract, we went to a hotel room for a meeting. It was Kelly Johnson, a few science advisors to the President, someone from the CIA, and myself. Pillows were put over the heat events and the room

was checked for bugs before any of us spoke. He said that at the time you thought it was pretty silly, but but you know, here's the thing is that during the Cold War there was a lot of spying going on on both sides. So while it sounds like you were being like incredibly paranoid to go to those kind of extremes to make sure that no one's listening, the fact is people were trying to listen. People are absolutely

trying to listen. Yeah. Luck you. Around the same time, it also instituted a policy that if any of the employees were approached by someone uh born out of the US who wished to befriend them, that they were supposed to inform management it ly, Yeah, yeah, you don't like your your friend Boris who seems to be incredibly helpful and wants to cheese plates. Yeah, introduce you to this new drink called vodka. You might want to report that first. Yeah,

I love It. Also ended up talking about what it was like to develop the technology they were working on at the time, because at this point they weren't using computer computers, were around in the in the fifties and sixties, but very few places were using them at this point. So he says that the engineers were actually going about the old fashioned way with slide rules and just they were actually writing things down, planning it out on paper,

and mixing chemicals by hand. Yeah, sometimes sometimes by feet. He talked about how they would mix chemicals and vats and it would often be like if you were stomping on grapes for wine, exactly, and they said it was exactly the same stuff they were using. So they were really using foot power power to mix some of the stuff, which when you consider what some of that stuff is, I'm not sure that all those people are okay. But

then we get to nineteen sixty two. This is when they start working really seriously on developing a a stealth vehicle, although at the time they had not quite perfected the way of going about it, and they started with a program called the A twelve also known as ox cart Um. They wanted to make it an invisible plane. So nineteen sixty two is when they started this ox cart program, right,

but the CIA wouldn't declassify it until two thousand seven. Yeah, that's how secret it was, so it was again another collaborative effort between Air Force CIA and lockeed just like the you two. It could travel at speeds of around two thousand miles per hour, and it was meant to reduce the radar cross section of the aircraft compared to earlier vehicles by making it smaller and making it out

of other materials besides just you know, metal materials. This was before they had figured out that the real secret to making a plane signature disappear was not in how large or small the plane was, but rather in the surface angles and how they create bounts of of of the radar signal exactly. So you know, we would eventually learned that you could actually have a pretty large aircraft that could still be effectively invisible to radar if the

surfaces were shaped the right way. This was before we knew that. So UM thirteen A twelve aircraft were produced under ox Cart and they actually would be tested again at groom Lake, also known as A fifty one, which while I still want to do that episode, I have been convinced that we can put that off for a little while. Uh So, anyway, there were other vehicles that

looked just like A twelves. And again it was another one of those kind of cover stories, right, the idea being that, well, if any of these vehicles are spotted, we can always say no, no, no. That was this other designation that looks just like the one you think it is. Nineteen sixty four. That's when we get the y F dash twelve A interceptor, which was based on the A twelve design. So that was the ox Cart design that was talking about just now, So same sort

of idea. So the A twelve ox Cart was really meant as a surveillance vehicle, okay, but the y F twelve A was meant as an interceptor, notther one of those fighters that could intercept other aircraft. Right. Um. Also, as Jonathan was just saying, um so, so president the president at the time was Lyndon B. Johnson, and he announced its existence, you know, only a year or so

after it had been in existence. Um but uh and and and that was in order to kind of shield old the fact that these other sneaky planes were flying around, right, So this interceptor. They everyone acknowledged the fact that these interceptors existed. They did not acknowledge that the A twelves existed, so if you were to spun A twelve, you would think it's just one of those y F twelve a's

and everything would be hunky dorry. And originally the Air Force was going to end up purchasing a bunch of planes the next generation of this, and that designation was YF twelve B, and and that would have that would have really worked. We think this this one was really mostly used as a test craft and as that kind of decoy, right right, and um that program was canceled,

didn't didn't happen. But one of the test pilots for the y F twelve A interceptor was Jim Irwin a k A. One of the astronauts who eventually landed on the moon. Yep, he uh, he's done a moonwalk literally, you know, and maybe figuratively too, maybe did the dance. I don't know, but he definitely has walked on the moon. I imagine that there was a pop culture impair it for anyone who had actually walked on the moon to

get moon walk at some point, I suppose. So. I don't know how you invent something retroactively, but I'm sure they've worked on that. Also. In nineteen four, that's when they introduced the s R. Well, they didn't introduce it. They built it and it was in operation, but we sure as heck didn't know about it yet, certainly not. The SR also known as the Blackbird. This is a

gorgeous aircraft's scary looking. Again. You look at this and then you look at the aircraft again in g I Joe, like I mentioned the last podcast, Cobra's got some aircraft will look like the Blackbird. They do. I had never thought about that before because it's all sleek and and and it just looks it looks like it's going fast. Wow,

it's staying still, but it could go very fast. This this was a mock three plane, which is which is like over two thousand miles per hour or like thirty six thousand kilometers per hour, and it could fly even higher than the YouTube. The YouTube, the cap on the youtubo is about seventy thousand feet. This could go eight

five thousand feet. So, uh. The it flew a lot of missions, but it would turn out that the You two would end up being more reliable and less expensive to maintain and would end up remaining in service longer. So the Blackbird ended up getting retired earlier. In fact, that you two is still in operations, so it's not

been retired. The last Blackbird mission was in about although I've heard the latest NASA still had one for environmental research, right right, Yes, so there are some that are being flown in non military applications, but as a military vehicle it was retired in It was another one of those that won one of those Collier trophies, which is understandable. Uh, it made a trip between New York to London in just under two hours. It was like one hour fifty

four minutes. I can't get to Florida and under two hours on on my airplanes. I mean they're not my airplanes. There. Yeah, we haven't gotten to the point yet where we have our private aircraft. If anyone would like to donate an aircraft tech stuff or you know, you just want to convince somebody. Well Discovery anyway, So it beat the previous speed record. So so the previous speed record was held by a plane that did that same trip and just

under five hours, so three hours different. So moving up to nineteen sixty six, this seems really early to me. We just did an episode about drones. When I say just did. It actually isn't that recent, but in the in the memorable past, and most of the drones that we were talking about in that episode really didn't start kicking off until or so and so it's in sixty six we we came across the dent one. We have the tag Board, which was an unmanned drone. It was

classified as above top secret. It would not be declassified until two thousand seven top secret. That when c I was just like, let's just go ahead and de classify all this stuff. I'm here, let's get to give me the d classify stamp. I'm just gonna go bonkers. So, yeah, the the tag Board was a drone that was and antenna. It was meant to receive commands through the antenna, so you would actually roll it from the ground or from

an aircraft. And in fact it was supposed to launch off one of those a twelve ox Cart aircraft, right right. I've I've read that some Blackbirds were used for this purpose. Is interesting. I was designed to fly out over territory where the U S didn't strictly have permission to fly over, because the idea was that since it was smaller, that it would be less likely to be noticed, and it was meant to take photos of sites like weapons facilities

at altitudes of around feet pretty low. And then in June nineteen sixty six, there was a tragic accident which, uh what happened was the drone was supposed to launch off the back of one of these ox cart A twelve aircraft, but it did not launch properly. It was going at an incredible speed like mock three, and it didn't launch properly, and it ended up cutting that aircraft in half. Yeah that the pilot and test engineer both ejected safely, but um but I believe drowned. Well the

test the test engineer did. Yeah, what happened was apparently the face plate on his uniform went up and water started rushing into suit. Yeah, so he and he tragically drowned in this accident. And uh so the project was wound up being scrapped. Yeah, it was. People at Lockeed were absolutely devastated by this. I mean, it was just a complete freak accident. It was unforeseen, and it really

shook things up back at Lockheed. I mean it was you know, anytime anything like this happens, obviously that's a terrible tragedy and this one just really affected them quite deeply. Uh. In nineteen seventy Lockheed would then go on to fire the test pilot, Francis Gary. Powers were listening earlier. That's the guy who was in the YouTube plane that got shot down over Russia. So he came back and he was still working for Lockheed. But then he decided to

write down some of his experiences. Yeah, he published a memoir about the whole experience and it was not really um shall we say, favorable to the CIA in particular, and then mysteriously he lost his job. Well, it may also be that, you know, lockeed very very serious about this whole let's keep our secrets kind of thing, and it may be that that also played a pardon. But yeah, that was that happened. Two. That's when this was crazy.

The HMB one Glomar Explorer. Okay, so this is a submersible barge, a barge that can go under the water. It actually was designed to go under the water and land on some underwater supports and the whole purpose of this thing was to act as a cover so that the United States could do a salvage operation on a sunken Soviet submarine, the idea of being that this thing

would cover up all of their operation. They would retrieve the submarine, pull it into the barge, bring the barge back above water, and sail it back and no one would have known that that's what they had done. It sounds like it came out of Hunt for October. If if Sean Connery was not aboard that saying chumping ship don't react well to bullish, I'd be really disappointed. We can only hope, and ended up eventually becoming one once it finished its job. Now what do you do with

a big submersible barge at that point? So it's been converted into a above water dry dock where you ships would come in and then be serviced and fixed or decommissioned or whatever. For a long time it was dry dock for another ship called the Sea Shadow, which we will talk about shortly. And then seven. Here are two of my favorite aircraft that have ever come out of

skunk works. These were also incredibly important. They were flown extensively at Groom like slash Area fifty one, so I wrote about them quite a bit when I wrote my article about how Area fifty one works. That's when the first time I ever learned about these these already have blue craft. Yeah one and two have Blue one and have Blue two. And these were proof of concept prototypes.

These two aircraft were incorporating all the information that Lockeed had been gathering about stealth technology in order to decrease their radars nature. So they were again top secret vehicles. They were tested quite a bit at groom like and the whole idea was now that getting those angular uh surfaces. So it looked a little weird because it had all these angles to to bounce the radar in random places. It was almost like a non Euclidean cthulhu type aircraft.

And it's not quite that much, but I mean it's like, you know, if you've ever seen those old stealth bombers, they look clunky, right, those weird angles. Yeah, it's totally the you know, like the opposite of the aero dynamic kind of thing that you think of when you think of something that's supposed to be flying. Its nickname wound up being the Hope the Hopeless Diamond, the Hopeless Diamond because it had these weird angles to it like the Hope diamond does. Because you know, it's been cut a

very specific way, so it's called the Hopeless Diamond. Um. Yeah, Like I said, you look at the s R seventy one Blackbird and that thing looks like it's going fast standing still. You look at one of these things and you're like, that is not meant to go into the air.

That that is just wrong on every level. Um. But you know, they decided to really go into this after the Vietnam War because during the Vietnam War, U S Forces kept on encountering trouble with surface to air missiles where a lot of aircraft were getting shot at and shot down by these missiles, and so they wanted to have something that could operate without being spied, you know, spied by. You don't want that to happen. So that was the main purpose. Um. Now they have Blue one

and two. They were just men as prototypes. It was really approve of concept was to show the US military, Hey, this is going to work. We can build this into an actual working aircraft that we will use for real military purposes. We just need the funding. And uh So it wasn't ever meant to go into combat. Didn't They didn't really go anywhere, but um, but the concepts behind it would wind up being used later on, which we

will talk about in our second half. We'll be back with more from Sniffing Elt skunk Works Part two in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. All right, let's get back into talking about the super secret stuff. So you know, we had just talked about the have Blue one and two obviously not meant for combat. I mean they could go six hundred miles per hour, which is about six kilometers per hour. That's not that

fast compared to other aircraft at the time. The prototype that's that's as fast as um that that first p A D that we were talking about, right, So obviously that was just sort of hey, look what we can do. That's when we started seeing a new version of the U two. Remember that was You two came out in the fifties and one you get. The You two are also known as the t R one, also known as the Dragon Lady, which granted was the original designation for

the c I A U two's way back when. But that was the thing is that the You two had largely become the domain of the Air Force, and now the You two are was this kind of super secret version of the U two which had an increased fuel capacity so it could fly longer, and the t R stood for Tactical reconnaissance, and it had a superpod which was kind of a little think of like a bulbous kind of projection where all of their super secret sensors were so very very um precisely tuned sensors to get

all kinds of information about the area they were flying over. Um. The current designation for this aircraft is now you two ARE, so it's no longer called the t R one, it's just the U two ARE. But there are other you two rs that are that don't have the superpod, so it's a little confusing. And there's been a whole bunch of different versions and designations of this over the years, and the utwo S one one of those, call your trophies. But the U two R, I believe, is still the

highest flying single engine airplane in service. Yeah, and also you've got to remember that skunk Works did not work on every very a of the U two. They worked on the first one, and they worked on the U two ARE, but by that time a lot of that work was going out to other branches of Lockeed. So this was, uh, you know, we're really just focusing on the skunkworks stuff here. If we were talking just about Lockeed this, we'd have to do like a six. Yeah, that would be like a nine party. So let's talk

about the F one seventeen. That is the night Hawk. The night Hawk the first radar evading aircraft. So we actually had these F one seventeen aircraft in use during Operation Desert Storm back in Lauren. You wouldn't remember that. You were I think, you know, two at the time,

so it was like nine okay. So the that was, by the way, the only jet in the coalition forces that had the authorization to strike targets within the city limits of Baghdad, because they thought that it was the only one that he get close enough to guarantee that the strike would hit the precise target and not hit

something else instead. Um it was off is referred to as a stealth fighter, although it was really an air took round combat vehicle, not air to air because when we think of fighters, we usually think of you know, aircraft that are designed to shoot down other aircraft. This was more of an attack vehicle than a fight fighter. The designations get a little confusing. I would have to keep looking them up because you know what, can I'm

a podcaster, not a fighter. So despite what Ben Bowling will tell you, because I did shake them up a bit this morning, I hear that that was for completely legit work purpose. Yeah, there's gonna be a stuff Mom never told you video that I will link out so that you can see me rough up Ben Bowling. It happens on a daily basis anyway, but this time I was calm camera anyway. The night Hawk was retired in two thousand and eight. It's another one of those called

your trophy winners. It's kind of interesting how many of these have one. That's when we get into something that's not an aircraft, the Sea Shadow, right, this was a prototype stealth ship. Yes, so funky. Did you see a picture of this? I have not known. You got to look up a picture. When we're done, I'll definitely have to link a picture of this on social as well, because it just looks really odd. We should make a gallery.

We can do. That's the excited to the most excited I've ever been about making a gallery because there's some pretty cool jets in this. We'll make a gallery for it. Sure. So the Sea Shadow is this prototype stealth ship. It had those weird angular surfaces kind of like stealth bombers, stealth fighters, that kind of thing. Um, but it think of it like it almost felt like it was suspended over the water, Okay, And you have these two wings that come down on either side, like think of a

manta ray that has its wings down towards the ocean floor. Right. The edges of the wings are obviously in contact with the water. The rest of the body appears to be above the water, and it's bulky. So you're like, how the heck is this thing? Turns out it's gut submerged hole. There's got this enormous hole that's underneath the water that submerged that is keeping it bulliant so it's not sinking

down and just flopping over on its side. But yeah, you look at this thing and you're like that just like the just like some of the aircraft, like that should not be to happen. That doesn't look like any thing that only works if that's non Newtonian fluid in that ocean, and I know that waters Newtonian, so that can't be it. Yeah, it was also a designed to

show off the usefulness of automation. The idea being that we could really have these vehicles that would need a relatively small crew because we automate as much of it as we possibly can. So there are twelve bunks aboard crew of twelve UM and it had a microwave. That was the only uh thing in the galley. There was no like stovetop or anything. It was a microwave and twelve bunks, So luxury, um and UH. It was really just kind of designed to be a proof of concept.

It was never meant to be a production vehicle. It was never meant to go to the military. Is more to say like let's see if this works kind of thing. Um so nothing. It was never built into any other kind of ships. Eventually it was retired. It went to that that barge I was talking about earlier, that was the dry dock. Uh. And then the eventually the state's government allowed the I want to say it was I want to say the navy took control. I didn't write

this down in my notes, I remember reading it. But anyway, the military organization in charge of the Sea Shadow decided to sell it, yeah, to to recoup some of some of this costs. They sold it to a company under under the stipulation that they had to immediately dismantle it. Yeah, they could not sail it. The United States government said all right, we're gonna sell this. We're gonna let you sell this off to whoever bids the most, but they cannot sail it. They have you can look at all

the bits you have to take it apart. So it was. It's been dismantled. So the Sea Shadow is no more. It was dismantled a couple of years ago. So that's kind of sad because when you see pictures of this thing. As soon as I saw I thought, I hope this is at a museum somewhere where I can go and see it. And nope, it is gone. So maybe someone will build a replica at some point. That's when they introduced the y F twenty two, also known as Yeah and usually we just called the F twenty two, which

was a stealth air superiority fighter. Superiority fighter. Yeah, it's meant to be souper. It's a fifth generation supersonic fighter. Single seat twin jet engine aircraft can also be an attack vehicle, so not just a fighter but also can can act out against land based targets, and it can serve as a signals intelligence vehicle. So the n s A is probably pretty interested in these things. That means

that it can intercept electronic messages. UM. And it formally entered the United States Air Force service in two thousand five. Son is when they start really working on it. Two thousand five is when it enters into service. So that's a long time, you know, more than a decade before it entered into service. Yeah, and there are still a few squadrons of them in in service today. Yeah, I

think there's somewhere something like ten squadrons totals something like that. Uh. And the final F twenty two was delivered to the United States Air Force on May second, two thousand twelve, so now long ago, no longer in production. But these things, by the way, obviously when you put in an for two thousand, five hundred UH jets, it takes a while to fill that order, as as you could possibly imagine. Um. UH. Corporate note in Lockheed and Martin would combine in what

was called a merger of equals. Right, so we've been talking about Lockheed all this time. But remember if you listen to the beginning of the last podcast, we talked about how the Martin Company was also instrumental in early days in aircraft. Well, they had been quite busy themselves and it developed many aircraft that also were incredibly innovative. And at this point the two companies merged together to

make a mega innovative aircraft company. Meanwhile, in nine six they come out with the Lockeed Martin skunk Works come out with the r Q three A dark Star Dark Star also known as Tier three or sometimes Tier three Minus, which was an unmanned aerial vehicle designed to be a high altitude drone. So uh, this was another one of those innovative approaches to trying to do surveillance without putting an actual human pilot at risking right, and and this was a project that would I I think that both

Tagboard and have Blue Um really influenced this one definitely. Yeah, because it had stealth technology making it harder to detect. It also had a lot of autonomy. It could take off, fly to its mission, complete its mission, and come back and land all without a human controller taking control of that. But also it had the ability for a human controller to get in there and change the parameters of the mission on the fly. So it wasn't like, you know, you had this pre programmed route that it had to

take and once you press play, that's it. You gotta wait till it comes back. You could actually change things on the fly and change the programming. So really innovative, particularly in n and it had a jet engine. It used jet engines for propulsion. It wasn't like a little rotor based drone. This is this is a jet um So officially that program was shelved sometime around but there are some rumors that it's not really shelf shelved so much as totally an operation. Yeah, and and like totally secret.

And uh, that's all I'm going to say about that, because honestly, I do not need another coffee break. Um so thou That's when we get the F thirty five Lightning or Lightning Too. Yeah, Lightning Too. It's the sequel to Lightning. So if you remember in our previous episode we talked about the first Lightning jet aircraft, which was way back in the very earliest days for Lockheed or when they were doing their work with the military. So the Lightning two is sort of the idea of the

next generation of military aircraft. It's a single seat, single engine, multi roll fighter. So multi roll also means they can do multiple things. It can be the ground attack, the air defense, reconnaissance. That yeah, it's like, you know, throw it at me, bro, I'm gonna do it. So there are three variations on the F thirty five that allow it to take off our land and a front environment. So for example, there's one version of the F thirty five that can land and take off from aircraft carriers,

but the others don't have that capability that sort of thing. Um, So depending on what you need, you use that particular type of of F thirty five. And the military has ordered a bunch of these have been things yeah more than uh, and they are going to the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines. Different branches are using them. For those of you who aren't familiar with the branches of the military in the United States, there are pilots

in these different branches, like air forces. Obviously you would you would immediately assume Air Force. I remember talking to a friend of mine who was telling me about how much he thought it was weird the way that the Air Force was depicted in top gun and do you mean the Navy, because those were Navy pilots. The top Gun program was a Navy program, not an air Force program. I'm not entirely positive that that the strict military accuracy was what people are watching Top Gun for. I don't

know either. I I knew that by the end of it, I I who had the need, the need for speed, But yeah, I don't know exactly how accurate it was all the way from the beginning to end. We'll return to the conclusion of our two part series on skunk Works in just a second after this quick break. Two one. That was the introduction of the Desert Hawk, and that's another drone. Yeah, another u a v on manned aerial vehicle. It was designed to be really portable. It was extremely light.

In fact, the original Desert Hawk was made out of essentially kind of foam. So think of like styrofoam or packing foam that you would find in a box. That's essentially what this thing was made out of. That makes more sense. Your next note is that they were launched by hand, and therefore, okay, I get that now. I think they even use bungee cords, so it's almost like a slingshot launch, and they had electric motors, so they were almost silent. Yeah, incredibly light, incredibly quiet. We now

no longer use the Desert Hawk actively. We have a replacement, the Desert Hawk three I'm just given over to. But the Desert Hawk three is what we use today. It's much more sophisticated and it uses a gyro stabilized three sixty degree sensor turret that's mounted on the bottom of it. It's pretty awesome. It's also made out of very lightweight composite material, so it's it's gone beyond the foam, but it's still very lightweight. Two thousand six. This might be

my favorite, the hybrid. This is a This is an airship, right, yeah, so that if you are at all of the steampunk vein, this is the aircraft for you. It looks like a blimp or a dirigible. It's it's an airship and it is beautiful. It's so it's meant to act as transportation. So it's got a large capacity for carrying lots of people and low operating costs, and it can operate from either existing infrastructure, meaning like some sort of landing field or landing strip like an airport or it could just

land anywhere that's a remote open space. So as long as there's not like stuff for it to bump into, it can land there. And the first commercial airship is scheduled for And uh, this is similar to another vehicle that's actually more of a military vehicle. In fact, it is a military vehicle that is also a future item that we'll be seeing from Lockheed won't maybe we won't see it, but it'll see us. I'm talking about ISIS, which is the integrated Sensor is Structure aircraft which looks

a lot like the Hybrid. It's another blimp type thing, but it's this is a stealth blimp. Yeah, and it's spies on you. Um yeah. So it's got surveillance and communications gear and flies in the stratosphere. So for those of you who listen to our Google Loon podcast, you know all about that. We're not gonna go over it again, but you know that's really yeah. So, and it also is able to actually detect targets that are undercover or

under camouflage. It's got like camouflage piercing radar. It's pretty cool stuff. So it's similar to the hybrid, and it also uses fuel cells so that makes sense because it's like the Hybrid two and solar panels to to get its hours. So right, the contract for this was was awarded to Lockeed Martin in two thousand nine. But but I think that we had did we have something else? It's it's not. No, it's not. It's not going to be. The isis. As far as I know, the delivery date

has not been divulged necessarily. I know that it's coming. It is listed on Lockheed Martin's website. If you go to their skunk Works website, they talk about it, so you can actually read about it. Um it is able to cover five million nautical square miles with surveillance from one and then you can locate it relocated anywhere in the world in within ten days for something that floats. That's pretty impressive. All right, So let's get back I

talked about the hybrid YAH. Also in two thousand nine, they advanced composite cargo aircraft, the A C C A. So again this is another look at using composite materials.

And the idea of using composite materials is finding something that has the strength of something like steel but is far lighter, so you want something that's really durable but very light, so that it ends up making your aircraft much more efficient you don't need as much fuel, and also reducing the kind of problems that you get with metals, like like corrosion and fatigue from those temperature differentials that you're going to get going up and down. That's that's

very true. So this is a way of getting around that. And uh, really again, this is one of those programs where it's not like the A c c A is going to become a leading aircraft. It's more like the technologies being explored while they're design stuff blue kind of thing where it's a working Yeah, we'll find it. It will end up emerging in other aircraft, right that Lockheed makes and that other companies make. Then we have two

thousand ten. That's when the Harvest Hawk took flight. So you might remember back in the other episode I talked about the Hercules cargo plane. I said, it's kind of a cargo plane, you know, for for propell our cargo plane. It's pretty big, neat, looking sort of useless at the time. Yeah, you know, like it wasn't useless, but it certainly wasn't like super secret like it wasn't like some sort of surveillance craft. Well, now we've got the Harvest talk, which

is the uh. The reason why it's called Hawk is it's the Hercules Airborne Weapons Kit. So it's a weaponized cargo transport aircraft. It's armed with hell Fire or Griffin missiles, guided bombs, and a thirty millimeter cannon and it's operated by the United States Marine Corps. I am terrified of this. This is terrifying. And now we're up to current day, two thousand thirteen and it's time to talk about the s R seventy two. So this would be kind of

the the black Hawks successor. This is a concept aircraft. It's one of those things that it hasn't even been funded yet, but Lockheed skunk Works has been working on it, and it would end up using two different jet systems to have a hypersonic jet. Hypersonic being super wicked fast. Here's the problem. So there are to the two different

types of engines. Would be your standard jet turbine engine, which tends to work at speeds at mock two or or slower, right, And that that's that's the kind of thing. I mean, the thing with these ramjets that we've talked a little bit about and scram jets, which stands for

a supersonic combustion ramjet. Although I just really like the word scramjet a whole bunch um is that you know, they can't they can't start moving until they're going really really fast because of that, because of that air drag that they need in order to fuel their Combustiblewise it just doesn't work. So you you have to be going really fast to to operate your scramjet. So this combines a jet engine and a scramjet using an over under fuel approach because you can't use the same fuel for

both of these either. It's actually a very complex system. But the idea is that the jet engine would get the the SR seventy two moving at around mock three, and then the scramjet would start to take over and then you would get up to your full speed, which is mock six, which is twice the old Blackbird and is about four thousand, five hundred miles per hour or I I recorded the other in meters per second and it's about two thousands per second. But really fast is

what we're talking about here. Yeah, And they would be armed with high speed strike weapons or h s S double US and so you can just think of it as a missile that is able to fly at hypersonic speeds. So they hope that they'll have a demonstrator program demonstrating this technological ability by prototype. Yeah so right now, like I said, there's no funding as of the recording of this podcast for this particular project, but it's one of

those things we're trying to do about. Yeah, there could be I mean, c I A might be you know, maybe an essay. Maybe they're like, we need to get away now that we've been looking at everybody's stuff. Um, But anyway, this could theoretically hit any target on any continent in less than an hour. So it takes off and within an hour anywhere in the world it could hit its target. Keeping in mind it's both the aircraft and the missile, which is HSSW. It goes at that

hypersonic speed. To big challenge involves actually heat management because when traveling at that speed, the friction from the air is intense. So they had kind of two different approaches they could go. They could go with a sort of a cool approach, which is where they use some form of heat shielding type stuff, kind of like the stuff that the Space Shuttle program used, or they could go

with a warm approach. Warm is a relative term. It's actually quite high temperature where it allows the aircraft to warm up, but you have the crew um sequestered in some way where they are able to operate without being hurt. Cooked, yeah, being cooked essentially. So if they go with the warm approaches, which is what they said they're going to do, and assuming it's going to be a manned vehicle, which that's still I hate to use this phrase, No, I don't

know in the air. It's still up in the air. Um, it could be manned or unmanned. But assuming it is manned, that probably means that the cockpit will not be a cockpit where you actually have a window out to see where everything is. They would be flying this thing that's traveling at mox six using inst meentation. So it's kind of like operating a submarine, except you I'll bring a submarine that's traveling at mocks six thousands of feet in

the air. So um, for those of you who have fear of flying, imagine that where you can't see out and you're going really fast. Yeah, yeah, again, I'm gonna I'm gonna respectfully bow out of that particular job. I think that podcaster is much better suited for me. Um

they have. They have also announced, though a collaboration with Boeing to compete in the U. S. Air Forces Long Range Strike Bomber Program, which is a challenge to deliver stealth long range bombers for operation in the twenties, with an upper price limit of only five fifty million dollars per unit, which I say only but is really not gone much for that thing prices people, We're just we

can't give these things away. Yeah, no, that's so I'm excited to see whether they actually come up with anything for that this. This was only announced I think in October. Um, we are recording this at the beginning of November, and who knows, maybe we won't actually see evidence of this till because that will be when the CIA declassifies it and let's us see it. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. If you have any

suggestions for future episodes, please let me know. Reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.