ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

136 The Hunt for Zero Point
Lockheed, now Lockheed Martin, would have taken Northrop's B-2
victory standing still.
Aviation Week had written about the "fast mover" that had been
observed crossing the night sky as a single, pulsating point of light. And
others had reported the manifest contradiction of a prominent Air Force
contractor at Palmdale that was filled to capacity with workers, was
hugely profitable, yet had nothing to show for it.
I told Marckus that my request to interview the head of the Skunk
Works, Jack Gordon, had just been given the green light.
Better still, it was to take place within the holy of holies itself.
It was only on the road to Lancaster, my next stop, across the border in
California's Antelope Valley and a three-hour drive across the Mojave
Desert, that I found the quiet I needed to work through what I'd been
unable to finish in my call to Marckus.
Its starting point was one of the keywords that I'd written down on the
note I'd penned and then trashed five days earlier: stealth. It all started
and ended with stealth. In 1943, Brown had been involved in an experiment
that sought to make a ship radar-invisible. His test was the first
attempt by anyone—certainly, as far as I knew—to have conducted a
genuine radar-stealth experiment.
At its heart was a technique developed by Brown to wrap a ship in a
field of intense electromagnetic energy, produced by powerful electrical
generators.
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense was briefed by
Lockheed on a new form of technology—essentially, to do with airframe
shaping—that reduced the radar cross section of a fighter-sized aircraft
to that of a large insect.
In 1976, the company was awarded a contract to develop the Have
Blue stealth demonstrator. Two years later, Lockheed was given the goahead
to develop the F-l 17A, the world's first "stealth fighter."
A new military science had been born—one that was about to change
the defense planning of entire nations.
As a result, the technology was classified to the rooftops. Stealth had
become America's biggest military secret since the bomb.
It was then that somebody must have remembered Northrop's
research papers into drag-reducing plasmas and dusted them off, recalling,
probably, that electrostatics had a highly beneficial spin-off effect: it
could reduce—perhaps even cancel altogether—the radar signature of an
aircraft.
A picture formed in my mind's eye of an insect-sized image on a radar