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

144 The Hunt for Zero Point
Soviet Union, it was Lockheed that came up with the solution. When
the Agency needed an aircraft to surpass the performance ofthat aircraft,
the glider-like U-2, again it was Lockheed that furnished the answer, this
time with the extraordinarily graceful Mach 3 A-12 Blackbird.
Like the U-2, the A-12 started as a black program, but gradually
moved into the light, emerging finally as the USAF SR-71, the fastest
operational aircraft in the world until its retirement in 1990. To this day,
there is nothing faster, but that, of course, presupposes the "Aurora"
stories aren't true.
Ben Rich, who succeeded Johnson in 1975, denied in his book Skunk
Works, which serves as its semiofficial history, that Aurora ever existed.
But Rich did not offer any plausible explanation for what his company
had been up to since it produced the last F-l 17A Stealth Fighter in 1990.
There had been rollouts of two YF-22 prototypes—the forerunner of the
USAF's new F-22A Raptor advanced tactical fighter—and a couple of
unmanned DarkStar reconnaissance vehicles, but neither of these could
account for the comings and goings of 4,000 workers or the busy
appearance of the low buildings I had passed on my way in.
I was questioning Gordon about the Skunk Works' operating charter
when he let slip that in the course of his 23 years with the company he
had worked on 15 "real flying aircraft"—adding hastily that he could
only talk about 12 of them.
It was in the ensuing seconds that the thought formed and rapidly
solidified in my sleep-starved brain.
Whatever was going on here, however many secret programs the
Skunk Works had on its books, none of them had anything to do with
antigravity.
Perhaps Aurora was real. Maybe it was the "fast mover" that people
had described crossing the high frontier above the Southwestern U.S. as
a pulsating point of light—as reported in Aviation Week in the late 1980s.
Maybe it employed a drag-reduction device of even greater sophistication
than the one apparently on the B-2. But whatever it was or wasn't,
Aurora was an aircraft, designed and developed by aerospace engineers.
Forty years earlier, T. T. Brown had proposed specifically that Project
Winterhaven should be built outside the aerospace industry. Maybe
Brown knew intuitively what it had taken me months to grasp. The
aerospace industry had more to lose from antigravity than it could ever
gain from it. Gordon's entire business base relied on the science of
aerodynamics. Take that away and he, it—everything about the aerospace
industry, in fact—ceased to have any role or purpose.
Antigravity threatened to wipe the aerospace industry off the map.