Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [218]
8. emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip: Interview with Peter Merlin.
9. Edward Lovick was standing on: Interview with Edward Lovick.
10. grandfather of stealth: Before working on the A-12, Lovick’s first job at Skunk Works was to try to reduce the radar reflections being bounced back from the U-2 to the Soviet radar systems. With Area 51 still shuttered from atomic fallout, the physicist’s first efforts took place at a remote hangar in the north corner of Edwards Air Force Base in California. There, Lovick and colleagues spent hours coming up with all kinds of antiradar schemes: “It was our job to invent something that would neither compromise the aircraft’s height, nor allow its hydraulic system to overheat as had happened with Sieker. Kelly Johnson had a rule: one pound of extra weight applied to the aircraft would reduce its altitude by one foot. This meant our camouflage coating couldn’t exceed a quarter of an inch and had to weigh as little as possible.”
11. aircraft would be radically different: Interviews with Ed Lovick, Dr. Wheelon, T. D. Barnes. Other federal agencies were also secretly experimenting with supersonic flight, but not sustained flight at Mach 3. The Air Force, NASA, and the Navy were involved in the experimental X-15, a hypersonic airplane that would lay the groundwork for travel into space. But the X-15 was boosted off the back of a mother ship, whereas the Agency’s new plane would leave the tarmac on its own power and return to the base the same way.
12. twenty-second window: Peebles, Dark Eagles, 51.
13. it loses precision and speed: Interview with Dr. Wheelon.
14. minutiae involving radar returns: Jones, The Wizard War. Lovick spent hours describing for me the fundamental concepts of radar, which is an acronym for radio detection and ranging, which first came into being in 1904 when a German engineer named Christian Hulsmeyer figured out that electromagnetic waves could be used to identify, or “see,” a metal ship floating in dense fog. It didn’t take long for the military to realize the inherent value of radar as a way to detect large, moving metal objects otherwise invisible to the naked eye. This was especially true for ships and airplanes, two key means of transport in twentieth-century warfare.
15. fourteen-year-old children were doing in 1933: Interview with Lovick. By high school, Lovick had created a radio receiver from scrap metal, vacuum tubes, and discarded radio parts which enabled him “to detect signals a hundred miles away, which gave me the intense feeling of discovering something that I did not previously have evidence as being there.”
16. the Archangel-1: Robarge, Archangel, 4–5. Archangel is a term meaning “an angel of high rank” and it is also a port city in northwestern Russia, home to many Soviet radar stations that would one day be trying to track the A-12.
17. fifty Skunk Works employees returned to Area 51: Ibid., 6.
18. “build a full scale mockup”: Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program, 5.
19. code-named Titania: United States Nuclear Tests July 1945 through September 1992 DOE/NV–209-REV 15, 144. The bomb was named after a satellite of the planet Uranus.
20. Each member of Lovick’s crew: Interview with Lovick.
21. “Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the magician”: Rich, Skunk Works, 198.
22. “by adding the chemical compound cesium”: Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program, 4. Johnson wrote: “we proposed the use of cesium additive to the fuel. This was first brought up by Mr. Ed Lovick of ADP, its final development was passed over to P&W.” Lovick recalls traveling to Pratt and Whitney’s research center in Florida where the aircraft engines were being tested. “I realized that I had utilized theory that applied to thermal ionization of gases and would need to use parameters appropriate to electron emission from hot solid surfaces. Our results