Skunk Works, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 75Ben Gilbert 28Brendan Eich 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Skunk Works comes up
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:17:12 David Rosenthal Yes, real close specifically to Lockheed's Skunk Works department.
- ▶ 2:17:19 David Rosenthal The secret Lockheed Skunk Works airplane hangers and, and department was in Burbank because Burbank was the sticks back then.
- ▶ 2:17:32 David Rosenthal So that's probably the bigger reason why the military requisitions the Disney lot is to protect skunkworks.
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:15:09 Ben Gilbert The way people talk about Adrian Newey is basically the same way that they talk about Kelly Johnson from Skunk Works from our Lockheed Martin episode.
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:59 David Rosenthal And the first of those stories is the famous Skunk Works.
- ▶ 9:41 David Rosenthal Who started the famous Lockheed Skunk Works division.
- ▶ 9:44 Ben Gilbert And this is great, because before I started the research, I was loosely aware that Lockheed had the first Skunk Works.
- ▶ 9:57 Ben Gilbert And like, it was not a thing until Kelly Johnson started the Skunk Works.
- ▶ 10:08 David Rosenthal That was written by Ben Rich, who was Kelly's second in command for a long time at Skunk Works and then took it over when Kelly retired.
- ▶ 11:36 David Rosenthal So after every Skunk Works test flight for the rest of his tenure running Skunk Works, they'd throw a big party, and Kelly would challenge anyone, all comers, to an arm wrestling match.
- ▶ 19:15 David Rosenthal California, and it is because of this that the name Skunk Works is born because of the outdoor nature in the tent and the smell coming from this plastics factory.
- ▶ 20:34 David Rosenthal What a testament to him and to this organization in the circus tent that he has built, the Skunk Works.
- ▶ 21:39 David Rosenthal You raise a really important point, though, that we didn't cover earlier about Lockheed and Skunk Works.
- ▶ 22:26 David Rosenthal This is the beginning of Skunk Works, and Kelly realizes, hey, this is something pretty special here, so I want to read a, a little quote from the Skunk Works book.
- ▶ 22:36 David Rosenthal That primitive Skunk Works operation set the standards for what followed.
- ▶ 23:10 David Rosenthal And the Gross Brothers and Lockheed's management agree, and they say, yes, you can keep this quote-unquote skunkworks division going as long as it doesn't take too much money,
- ▶ 23:27 David Rosenthal So Kelly is both the chief engineer of all of Lockheed and running Skunk Works at the same time.
- ▶ 23:33 Ben Gilbert This not taking too much money thing does become a core tenet of the Skunk Works operation because you can sort of get around management's ire and management's need to report to shareholders and things like that if you're doing amazing…
- ▶ 25:31 Ben Gilbert The other thing on the small number of people, this gets to the Skunk Works rules, and Kelly created this incredible document, 14 rules, that we'll link to in the show notes.
- ▶ 28:41 Ben Gilbert All right, David, so what makes Skunk Works work?
- ▶ 29:55 David Rosenthal The next one I wanna talk about is the Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program.
- ▶ 30:33 David Rosenthal And at its most productive, Skunk Works I think was about maybe 50 designers and engineers and maybe a hundred machinists and shop people.
- ▶ 31:48 David Rosenthal And I think the reason this was taken for granted for, like, all of Skunk Works' heyday was
- ▶ 32:34 David Rosenthal There's this great quote in Skunk Works where Ben Rich tells the story of his first day in Skunk Works where he's shown the U-II prototype.
- ▶ 33:36 David Rosenthal Skunk Works addresses that with the P-AT shooting star.
- ▶ 36:53 David Rosenthal And nobody is better suited than Skunk Works.
- ▶ 38:43 Ben Gilbert And so Skunk Works, being the ambitious organization that they are, tries for option one, and we don't frankly know very much about what Russia's capabilities are, so we're pretty sure that we can build some airplane that flies high enough…
- ▶ 39:14 David Rosenthal They are building their own air capabilities and all of the work that Skunk Works does here and for many years to come is for the CIA.
- ▶ 39:23 David Rosenthal So, what exactly is the challenge that Skunk Works has laid out in front of them for designing this new spy plane?
- ▶ 39:58 David Rosenthal So the CIA's spec for Skunk Works for the U-II is to fly at 70,000 feet.
- ▶ 41:15 David Rosenthal So Lockheed and Skunk Works win the contract from the CIA.
- ▶ 41:44 David Rosenthal So Skunk Works completes and delivers the plane by July, 1955.
- ▶ 42:10 David Rosenthal This is what Skunk Works is capable of.
- ▶ 46:24 Ben Gilbert If you're curious, listeners, there's this great, uh, documentary on Amazon called Secrets in the Sky, the Untold Story of Skunk Works that has a bunch of footage of all of this.
- ▶ 46:49 David Rosenthal Skunk Works creates Area-fifty-one.
- ▶ 47:04 Ben Gilbert It's all goodness for Skunk Works.
- ▶ 47:32 David Rosenthal Yeah, it's all skunk works in the U-II.
- ▶ 48:04 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I mean, a great sacrifice to bring this program and subsequent Skunk Works programs into the world, but basically what was happening is if you didn't breathe pure oxygen for two hours, you could get the bends, you know, for anyone…
- ▶ 56:49 Ben Gilbert And this, listeners, is where, if you've read Skunk Works or watched documentaries about Skunk Works, what we're about to talk about is not in any of those.
- ▶ 56:57 Ben Gilbert This is a completely separate story that takes place in a different place in California that is a detour from our Skunk Works story.
- ▶ 57:05 Ben Gilbert And we'll be back because, my God, did Skunk Works do some incredible things after the U-two.
- ▶ 1:08:52 David Rosenthal And what LMSC, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, did, I honestly think, like, it is bigger impact to the country, to the world, and certainly on business to Lockheed and to Silicon Valley than Skunk Works.
- ▶ 1:09:09 Ben Gilbert There are a lot of Skunk Works devotees, David.
- ▶ 1:09:17 David Rosenthal They patterned themselves after Skunk Works and took so many of the Skunk Works management principles up to Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 1:09:43 David Rosenthal Obviously, this is also top secret stuff, just like Skunk Works.
- ▶ 1:09:46 David Rosenthal So just like Skunk Works, they set up the new missiles division in Burbank, also in an unmarked building.
- ▶ 1:09:53 David Rosenthal They literally just copy-paste Skunk Works right there in Burbank.
- ▶ 1:10:19 David Rosenthal But it's important that the missiles division did start there because they took, as I said, a lot of Skunk Works management practices.
- ▶ 1:17:57 David Rosenthal And really, as we'll see, this division, you know, not Skunk Works, this division kept Lockheed alive.
- ▶ 1:28:23 David Rosenthal Ok, so, remember back when we pressed pause on the Skunk Ork story and
- ▶ 1:28:57 Ben Gilbert And you might know that eventually after the U-II, Skunk Works would create the next great spy plane, the SR-seventy-one, which we will get to, but that wasn't for a little while, so this intelligence gap was filled by this secret, not…
- ▶ 1:45:33 David Rosenthal So, you know, we're now in the seventies as this is going along, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about this as we come back to Skunk Works here in a sec, but we're getting towards the end of the Cold War, and this stuff is less…
- ▶ 1:49:08 David Rosenthal Okay, two other things that I want to talk about with LMSC before we come back to the coda on Skunk Works and the Blackbird and all that.
- ▶ 1:49:24 David Rosenthal The stories that we've just told, is this more impactful to America and the world than what Skunk Works was doing?
- ▶ 1:50:14 David Rosenthal So all of the rest of Lockheed, Skunk Works included, was in the red.
- ▶ 1:52:14 David Rosenthal So the other thing I want to talk about before we come back to Skunk Works is LMSC's operating principles and philosophy, and so much of that was built off the shoulders of Skunk Works.
- ▶ 1:52:40 David Rosenthal And most of them are very similar to the Skunk Works rules.
- ▶ 1:52:48 David Rosenthal One of them, though, that I want to highlight and discuss that to me stands out as different from Skunk Works is tenet number one.
- ▶ 1:53:07 David Rosenthal That element is missing from Skunk Works and Kelly's philosophy.
- ▶ 1:53:53 David Rosenthal Obviously, what Skunk Works was doing was really important.
- ▶ 1:54:10 Ben Gilbert Can you please take us back to Skunk Works?
- ▶ 1:54:32 David Rosenthal So, Skunk Works, the greatest airplane ever built.
- ▶ 1:54:41 David Rosenthal So, when Gary Powers is shot down in May, 1960, of course, as you would expect, the CIA and Skunk Works is already hard at work at the successor airplane to the U-two.
- ▶ 1:56:42 David Rosenthal This was essentially the same airplane, we'll talk about the differences in a minute, but this was the CIA contract that they had Skunk Works working on, and it was, yeah, the goal of make this thing so fast that whether they see it or…
- ▶ 1:59:35 David Rosenthal Okay, so when Skunk Works and Kelly and Ben Rich and everybody sit down to work on this, the current state-of-the-art fastest plane at the time, this is late-nineteen-fifties when they start working on this, is the McDonnell Douglas F-IV…
- ▶ 2:00:05 David Rosenthal And the F four itself was only a bit faster than the Skunk Works built F one Oh four star fighter that Ben, you mentioned earlier, which was the first Collier trophy that Kelly Johnson won.
- ▶ 2:05:15 David Rosenthal In fact, at least according to Ben Rich and Skunk Works, they could only produce about 25% of the thrust required.
- ▶ 2:06:46 Ben Gilbert But they did consider, I think, Kelly and the Skunk Works team were really advocating to build a tactical aircraft that was based on this, or a bomber, and that never happened, so every version of the SR-V-I or the early prototypes of the…
- ▶ 2:07:10 David Rosenthal So, fortunately, you know, Scott Gorks and the CIA had started working on the A-II ox cart before Gary Powers was shut down.
- ▶ 2:08:28 David Rosenthal So, Skunk Works has to go and, like, redo all of their documentation for the whole damn thing.
- ▶ 2:14:26 David Rosenthal In 1970, the Pentagon cancels further orders, and they order Skunk Works to destroy all of the titanium tooling for it so that no more can ever be built.
- ▶ 2:14:52 David Rosenthal The existing ones do stay in service, but obviously this is like a big blow to Skunk Works revenue.
- ▶ 2:15:02 David Rosenthal On the back of that, Skunk Works has to do layoffs, the Skunk Works division, after the contract is canceled.
- ▶ 2:15:08 David Rosenthal In 1972, two years later, Lockheed and Skunk Works lose the bidding for the F-sixteen fighter.
- ▶ 2:15:33 David Rosenthal So here's what's interesting about this contract and Lockheed and Skunk Works losing it.
- ▶ 2:16:11 David Rosenthal And so, he and Skunk Works bidding on this project,
- ▶ 2:16:18 David Rosenthal Like, the idea of Skunk Works losing a contract, this is crazy.
- ▶ 2:17:58 David Rosenthal Ben Rich takes over as head of Skunk Works.
- ▶ 2:18:01 David Rosenthal Skunk Works is doing layoffs.
- ▶ 2:21:03 David Rosenthal Back to Skunk Works.
- ▶ 2:21:04 Ben Gilbert There is one more great Skunk Works airplane, and it is under the administration of Ben Rich, Kelly's successor.
- ▶ 2:21:11 David Rosenthal One last hurrah, at least for the traditional Skunk Works organization.
- ▶ 2:21:36 Ben Gilbert But somebody at the Skunk Works reads the paper and says, huh, I think all the ways that we've been thinking about trying to make an airplane stealth, like the SR-seventy-one, with flattening the bottom a little bit and trying to use…
- ▶ 2:22:20 David Rosenthal That Skunk Works employee was then thirty-six-year-old Dennis Overhalser, who, uh, was a mathematician, and he, like you said, reads this paper and brings it to Ben Rich, who just six months earlier had taken over from Kelly as head of…
- ▶ 2:22:46 Ben Gilbert Lockheed's yes man, and we're gonna use the Skunk Works for branding and marketing, but we're not doing anything too nutty in your little shop over there.
- ▶ 2:25:55 David Rosenthal We didn't come to you guys cuz Skunk Works hasn't made a fighter plane in God knows how long.
- ▶ 2:27:30 David Rosenthal This is Skunk Works on the line.
- ▶ 2:28:49 David Rosenthal So out of that, the dark horse, Skunk Works, wins the contract to build the Air Force's stealth fighter.
- ▶ 2:29:02 David Rosenthal For the first time, or at least that we know of, really the first time in Skunk Works history, the way you control this thing is with fly-by-wire, which I'd heard that term before, but fly-by-wire means that the plane's systems are…
- ▶ 2:30:00 David Rosenthal The Air Force starts taking delivery in 1983 of the stealth fighter from Skunk Works.
- ▶ 2:30:18 David Rosenthal A time when they desperately needed it, and Skunk Works desperately needed it.
- ▶ 2:30:48 David Rosenthal Which again, Skunk Works hasn't built one of those since, I guess, what, the one-oh-four Starfighter?
- ▶ 2:34:04 David Rosenthal In terms of the airplane itself and Lockheed and Skunk Works and the company, while Desert Storm was, on the one hand, this great success story for the airplane,
- ▶ 2:45:49 Ben Gilbert So Ben Rich basically called it in 1992 when he was talking about, this at the end of the Skunk Works book, about the end of the B-II bomber program.
- ▶ 2:47:01 Ben Gilbert For better or for worse, this piecemeal manufacturing approach, rather than the Skunk Works way, will characterize large aerospace projects from now on.
- ▶ 2:47:37 Ben Gilbert It basically marks the end of Skunk Works.
- ▶ 2:47:39 Ben Gilbert Skunk Works is still a term that is used to describe a part of Lockheed Martin, but is it the Skunk Works of the fifties, sixties, seventies?
- ▶ 3:06:10 David Rosenthal The motivation of people who are going to work at Skunk Works, they were doing it out of patriotism for their country.
- ▶ 3:09:50 Ben Gilbert There's Aeronautics, which, in theory, contains Skunk Works.
- ▶ 3:26:42 Ben Gilbert Is not actually the best outcome, and it sort of seems like the same thing in the military-industrial complex, where we're willing to sign a contract for airplanes that we get in 25 years, because they're these, like, big, huge…
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