Lockheed Martin is in the same boat as other contractors: trying to kick up support for more Pentagon business amid flat defense budgets.
Lockheed Martin’s newest Skunk Works facility spans 215,000 square feet in the California desert. | Courtesy of Lockheed MartinPALMDALE, Calif. — Sixty-two miles north of Los Angeles, this desert town known as America’s Aerospace Valley is home to one of the most secretive aircraft design and production programs on the planet.
For just a few hours last month, Lockheed invited a select group of reporters to tour the massive facility, lifting the veil behind its magic workshop for the first time in eight years. Skunk Works produced the U-2 spy plane that could — and still does — collect images from 70,000 feet; the SR-71 Blackbird, a Mach-3 aircraft that could fly at speeds greater than Mach 3; and the F-117 Nighthawk, the first stealth fighter.
“So many of these things are being done in classified program settings,” he said. “It's probably really just a way to say, ‘Hey, we're competitive, we've made investments in some of these areas.’” Nearly 80 years later, it’s a lot more high-tech than high-top. Skunk Works has just completed a 215,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility that can crank out aircraft for the U.S. and its allies as they look to future conflicts.
One of the glass cases features an unassuming briefcase. It’s the one Johnson used when visiting CIA headquarters to show an early model of what became the A-12, a predecessor of the SR-71. citing personal reasons, and his announcement coincided with Lockheed Martin’s disclosure of a $225 million loss on a classified aeronautics program.
Because of the classified nature of the undisclosed program, it’s likely the project has ties to Skunk Works, but company executives did not comment on the loss during the visit. Local dignitaries joined Lockheed Martin executives for a ribbon-cutting ceremony here. Due to the rise of the Delta variant, attendees still had to physically distance themselves and wear masks.
Walking through an underground tunnel to one of the dozens of buildings on campus, guests surface in another facility. This is where. It’s one of the few unclassified programs at Skunk Works.
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