by Ben R Rich
My fact finding took me into the dark and gloomy basement of the chemistry building at Berkeley, where Nobel Laureate William Giauque held forth from a reinforced basement bunker doing his prize-winning experiments on low temperature research. I couldn’t help noticing some holes punched in the walls, courtesy of errant handling of small teacup amounts of liquid hydrogen by student lab assistants. “Handle with extreme care, Mr. Dover,” Professor Giauque warned me. “That’s why they keep me stashed away in this dungeon.” When I told him that I wanted to learn how to make liquid hydrogen and store it in the hundreds of gallons, the professor shook his head solemnly. “With all due respect, sir, I think you’ve got a screw loose.”
I wanted to protest: “Not me, Prof, but that lunatic I work for.”
Actually, the idea of using hydrogen as a propellant had been kicking around since the end of World War II, primarily to fuel rocket engines, simply because its volatility created tremendous thrust. But Kelly wasn’t thinking of a rocket engine; he wanted a conventional jet engine fueled by liquid hydrogen that could cruise for hours above Mach 2. Rocket engines were indeed like comets—blazing into the sky for a minute or two before extinguishing. As a hard-nosed businessman Kelly was not about to commit to building such an airplane unless he felt assured that we could produce sufficient supplies of fuel and learn how to handle it safely. So when I returned to Burbank armed with blueprints and technical manuals, Kelly smiled upon me benevolently and told me I was in charge of building our own hydrogen liquefaction plant.
He sent me to a remote corner in the Lockheed complex, which had been during World War II a communal air raid shelter for hundreds of workers in the nearby B-17 bomber factory. Since then, it had been used to store bombs and bullets for our flight test division. It had eight-foot-thick walls and underground bunkers and was, I noticed, as far away as he could get from us in case something went wrong and we blew up. “Here’s what I want,” he told me. “I want to show the blue-suiters that working with liquid hydrogen is not so risky once you attain experience handling it. I want to prove that a damned Air Force airman can handle it as well as a Ben Rich.”
The reason he was mentioning the Air Force was that the CIA had quickly rejected the idea of building a hydrogen airplane as the successor to the U-2. Bissell had had his own bean counters estimate the development costs, which were in the $100 million range—too costly for the agency’s secret contingency funding, which bypassed the usual congressional appropriations committees. Even the CIA would find $100 million hard to hide. The Air Force, smarting for having to play a passive role in the U-2 Russian overflight operation, was receptive. The hydrogen airplane would put the blue-suiters in the driver’s seat for the next round of spy flights. Kelly had a promising preliminary discussion about the concept with the top Air Force brass involved with planning and development. They were eager to work with Kelly Johnson on just about anything involving Soviet overflight operations and decided to fund a feasibility study and begin the process of selecting a manufacturer to build a hydrogen-fueled engine.
I was a key player in the feasibility study. I had to prove that the fuel was safe and practical to produce in large batches. Kelly wanted me to try to create controlled explosions and fires in order to learn what we were up against. I requested Dave Robertson to help me. Davey was one of the shrewdest, most instinctive engineers I had ever known, with the right flair for these wild experiments.
Thank God my wife, Faye, had no inkling of how I was earning my paycheck in the late autumn of 1959. I remember huddling behind cement barricades with Robertson, trying to create a “controlled” explosion by rupturing tanks filled with liquid hydrogen under pressure. Nothing happened. The hydrogen just escaped into the atmosphere. So we set a charge and ignited it. Because of its low density the fireball quickly dissipated. The biggest bang, which knocked us four feet backwards, came when we mixed liquid oxygen with an equal amount of liquid hydrogen. The shock wave thudded against a huge hangar under construction about five hundred yards away and nearly knocked four workers off the scaffolding, while Davey and I huddled out of sight behind the cement wall, giggling like schoolboys.
One of our colleagues named our walled-in compound Fort Robertson because the guy and the place seemed perfectly mated, and the name stuck. We got Dr. Scott of the Bureau of Standards cleared to work with us as an adviser. The Fort Robertson complex was located less than a thousand yards from the Municipal Airport’s in-bound runway. And the first time Dr. Scott paid us a visit and saw the three tanks of liquid hydrogen holding hundreds of gallons under storage, his knees began to shake. “My God in heaven,” he exclaimed, “you’re gonna blow up Burbank.”
Scott came up with a brilliant idea. He suggested we substitute liquid nitrogen, which was less volatile and dangerous than liquid hydrogen, in our experiments as a safer substitute to test what might happen if we used liquid hydrogen under certain conditions. We made about twelve hundred gallons of liquid nitrogen. We made a martini in a dixie cup, then dipped a popsicle stick in the liquid nitrogen and used it to stir the martini. It became a popular taste treat for those cleared to visit us.
In less than three months, working with twelve Skunk Works shop workers and mechanics, we began producing more liquid hydrogen than any other place in the country—about two hundred gallons daily. We stored it in a ten-foot-high tank capable of pumping six hundred gallons a minute. We wore special grounded shoes and couldn’t carry keys or any other metallic objects that might spark. We installed a nonexplosive electrical system and used only nonsparking tools. Dave Robertson also invented a special hydrogen leak sniffer around the tanks that would immediately sound a klaxon horn warning that would send us running—probably for our lives.
Kelly was pleased with our progress. On the drawing boards was a design for the dart-shaped CL-400 that would fly at 100,000 feet at Mach 2.5 with a 3,000-mile range. The body was enormous, dwarfing any airplane on the drawing boards. On the playing field at Yankee Stadium, for example, the tail would cover home plate and the nose nudge the right-field foul pole, 296 feet away. It was more than twice the size of the B-52 bomber. And the reason the body was so gigantic was that it would carry a fuel load of liquid hydrogen weighing 162,850 pounds, making it the world’s largest thermos bottle. Flying at more than twice the speed of sound, the outer shell of the body would blaze from heat friction above 350 degrees F while the inside skin would hold the frosty fuel at temperatures of minus 400 F—an 800-degree temperature differential that represented an awesomely complicated thermodynamic problem. Undaunted, Kelly promised to have a prototype ready in eighteen months.
The Air Force allocated $96 million, and we were off and running. The code name was Suntan, and it was classified above top secret. That was a first even for us. Only twenty-five people at the Skunk Works were cleared to work on it. And around the time that the U-2 overflights of Russia revealed that no bomber gap existed, the CIA dropped a bombshell by presenting Eisenhower with strong indications that the Russians were crashing development of a hydrogen-powered airplane of their own.
They had released from a Siberian gulag a brilliant scientist named Pyotr Kapitsa, who had been arrested by Stalin in 1946 for refusing to work on their atomic bomb development. Kapitsa was Russia’s foremost expert on liquid hydrogen. He was now back in Moscow working on a top secret program. Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell agreed that it was likely the Russians were rushing development of a liquid hydrogen–propelled interceptor that could easily climb to the U-2’s heights and shoot it down. The CIA came to Kelly and asked his opinion. “They might be working their tails off to get this airplane into production,” he told Dulles, “but they won’t have a prototype finished in less than three years or even longer.”
So suddenly we found ourselves in a contest with the Russians to build the first hydrogen-powered airplane. The Air Force contracted with Pratt & Whitney to build the engines at its Florida complex, and a special hydrogen liquefaction plant was constructed to fu
el the engine tests. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was working on an inertial guidance system, and Kelly ordered two and a half miles of aluminum extrusions in advance of construction.
But six months into the project the furrows deepened on Kelly’s brow. He was growing increasingly concerned that the airplane would not have adequate range to get the job done. “We’ve crammed the fuselage with as much fuel as it can hold,” he complained at our weekly progress meeting, “and we can’t extend the range by more than twenty-five hundred miles.” The problem was complicated by the fact that the Air Force engineers at Wright Field had come up with wildly more optimistic figures. They predicted a range of thirty-five hundred miles, which was more than acceptable, matching the U-2’s. Kelly stepped up design changes and wind tunnel testing of various wooden models but remained convinced that Wright Field’s calculations were dead wrong.
Meanwhile I was having troubles of my own. Inside a hangar I built a half-scale model of the fuselage and constructed a double-walled fuel tank. I wanted to simulate supersonic flight temperatures, so I installed a wooden-framed oven over the fuselage to heat it to 350 degrees F or higher. And on a clammy spring evening in late 1959, the damned stove caught on fire only a few feet away from a storage tank containing seven hundred gallons of liquid hydrogen. We tried to put the fire out with commercial fire extinguishers but they had little effect. I sure as hell was reluctant to call the Burbank Fire Department and have them discover all that liquid hydrogen. I thought fast and told the workers, “Okay, dump that damned hydrogen. Bleed that tank dry.” By now the hanger was filled with smoke and flames were visible above the model fuselage. The workers looked at me funny but did what I told them, and on that damp evening the cold hydrogen filled that hangar with a fog five feet thick. All we could see of one another were our heads. If it wasn’t for the fire we might have had a good laugh. But the fire department noisily arrived at our hangar door and the next problem was that security didn’t want to let them in. The firemen weren’t cleared and this was a project above top secret. I couldn’t believe the stupidity, but I took one of the security guys aside and said, “The whole place is under fog. They won’t see what’s on fire.”
“What is inside?” the fire chief asked me.
“National security stuff. Can’t tell you,” I replied.
The firemen saw the fog and went running for their gas masks. Had they known we were playing around with liquid hydrogen so close to Burbank Airport, I’m sure they would have had my scalp, but they put out the fire in two minutes and went away, no questions asked. But Kelly was cranky with me. “Goddam it, Rich, why in hell did you use a damned wooden-framed stove? That was just asking for trouble.” I told him he was nickel-and-diming me so severely on this project that a wooden-framed stove was all I could afford. He couldn’t argue.
God knows how many hours I spent as part of a small team sitting in Kelly’s office, reviewing all our data and trying desperately to pull a few range-extending tricks out of the bag. We knew damned well what the problems were. We missed our lift-over-drag ratio by 16 percent from what we originally had estimated, and our specific fuel consumption was disappointing too. We thought we would be able to achieve one-fifth the fuel consumption of a standard kerosene-fueled engine at Mach 2.5. Instead we were able to achieve only one-fourth the fuel consumption—not good enough to get us where we needed to go and back.
The only way to extend range was by improving fuel consumption, adding more fuel storage capacity and improving lift over drag to make the airplane fly more efficiently. We had done all that we could in each of these critical areas and were still a thousand miles short of our guarantee to the Air Force. Since I was his “expert” on the exotic fuel, Kelly asked for my opinion. I said, “Two thousand miles will only get us from Los Angeles to Omaha. We would have to land at a base that stored liquid hydrogen for us to refuel. Air-to-air refueling is out, so we would need strategically placed liquid hydrogen tank farms in Europe and Asia to refuel our airplane on its flights over Russia, leaving us with the nightmare problems of logistics and handling of a touchy, volatile fuel. Right now, we are having huge headaches shipping in our special fuel to our U-2 base in Turkey and that does not require special refrigeration and expert handling.”
Kelly sighed and said he agreed with me.
He picked up the phone and called Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas Jr. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m building you a dog. My recommendation is that we cancel Suntan and send you back your money as soon as possible. We don’t have the range to justify this project.”
It look several Pentagon meetings with Kelly before the Air Force reluctantly agreed with him. We had spent about $6 million in development costs and returned $90 million to the government. The punch line to the story is this: not long after the contract was canceled, the Soviets launched their Sputnik 1 into orbit. The rocket engine that had carried it into space was hydrogen-fueled. The engine builder was Pyotr Kapitsa, who had been released from the gulag not to build an airplane but to launch Sputnik.
We had all guessed wrong.
But our exercise on the hydrogen airplane was not a total waste. General Dynamics was working on a hydrogen-powered rocket called Centaur; so we turned over to them all our cryostats and liquid hydrogen pumps. We in the Skunk Works had proved to ourselves that we could develop a large supersonic airplane and engine. Even before Powers was shot down, Kelly had determined that we would need to make a quantum leap in technology in order to keep our spy planes operational over Russia. Within months we would be planning a technological marvel called the Blackbird as successor to the U-2. Once again we’d be teamed with Dick Bissell and the CIA and challenged to produce a new miracle.
Postscript on the U-2
All through the escapades involving the hydrogen airplane, the main occupation inside the Skunk Works was maintaining the production line of new U-2s. Many Americans believe that the U-2 died the day that Powers was shot down. The CIA did in fact close down its secret bases overseas and come home, but we had sold more than twenty U-2s to the Air Force back in the late 1950s and more than twice that number since then, and there never has been a single day since that airplane became operational in 1956 that a U-2 isn’t flying somewhere in the world on a surveillance operation for the blue-suiters, NASA, or the Drug Enforcement Agency. In fact, on more than one occasion over the years, the U-2 may have saved the world from thermonuclear war.
Although Eisenhower decreed the end to Soviet overflights after the Powers tragedy, the blue-suiters very soon began flying U-2s along the Soviet border using new technologies like side-looking radar, which could peer two hundred miles or more inside Russia, and carrying special electronic packages that could capture all the different military-band and radar frequencies used by the Soviet defense forces, helping us to build effective jamming devices in the event of hostilities. In many ways this electronic intelligence collecting was even more valuable than the photo-taking operations of old.
Around the time that Eisenhower left office in 1960, Dick Bissell and the CIA were teamed with Lockheed’s Missiles and Space Company to put up the first spy-in-the-sky satellite. A satellite was locked into its orbit, but a U-2 could overfly any trouble spot on earth in a few hours. And we never stopped improving the airplane. We invented a novel interchangeable nose that could be unscrewed and unbolted in less than an hour and replaced for a particular mission—some noses carrying radar, some cameras, some air-sampling filters, some electronic devices recording radar and military traffic frequencies, some operating a special rotating camera that could follow the flight path of a Soviet-launched test missile. Other flights carried a heavy payload of electronic eavesdropping equipment. By monitoring their test missile firings we discovered the frequencies used by their missiles locking to a target. We used this information to counter with powerful jamming devices installed in our attack aircraft.
One unforeseen consequence of the Powers shoot-down was
to make U-2 overseas bases a political hot potato for our host country allies allowing us to take off and land on their soil. The Russians were frothing at the mouth at the mention of the U-2, threatening dire reprisals—including air attacks—against any country hosting a U-2 base. As pressures built, both Japan and Turkey capitulated and asked us to fold our tents. To become more self-sufficient, we decided to develop an air-to-air refueling capacity for the U-2, extending its range to roam very far from home on spy missions. It would also allow us to do more low-level flying to avoid radar detection, which was very fuel inefficient. Refueling could extend the U-2’s range to seven thousand nautical miles and fourteen straight hours of flying time, which pushed a pilot’s fatigue beyond safety. The U-2s could receive nine hundred gallons of fuel from a KC-135 tanker in about five minutes. But most U-2 pilots agreed with our test pilot Bill Park, who flew the first extended-range mission and sighed, “Never again. My mind went numb ten minutes ahead of my ass.”
The Army wanted to use the U-2 for battlefield surveillance. As for the Navy, Kelly had polished off a bottle of White Horse up at Edwards Air Force Base with a couple of old pal Air Force generals, one of whom had bet him that the Navy would never buy a U-2 because the airplane could not take off from a carrier deck. “You don’t have the horses to get into the air,” one general challenged Kelly, who got sore and told the general he didn’t know what in hell he was talking about. Then the three of them staggered out of the officers club and paced out the length of a carrier deck on the main runway at Edwards. Later that day, they got a U-2 to take off. Kelly won his bet with ease. And so the Navy was interested in purchasing the U-2 for its own reconnaissance uses, including extended-range antisubmarine patrols.
Also through the CIA, we completed a deal with the Chinese nationalist government on Taiwan, selling them several U-2s for $6 million, along with the services of our ground crews and technicians. Kelly signed the contract for us, and Chiang Kai-shek signed for the Taiwanese, but the nationalist government had nothing to do with the operation except to provide pilots. The CIA was in charge and in control of the operation. They would be overflying Communist China from Formosa and were called Detachment H. This operation was one of the most tightly held secrets in the government. We began training six of their pilots. I remember briefing them on the U-2’s propulsion system at Burbank in the summer of 1959. On one of the training flights from the Ranch, a Taiwanese pilot flamed out over Cortez, Colorado, and was forced to glide into a small county airport around dusk. The airport manager took one look and almost fainted. The airplane was one that he had never seen before—long and sleek with enormous wings. Then the canopy opened and out stepped an alien in a space suit, with only almond-shaped eyes visible through his visor, who ran to him, shouting in very garbled English, “Quick. Get gun. Guard plane. Very, very secret.”