Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works And The Days When America Did The Biggest Things
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Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works And The Days When America Did The Biggest Things<br>Set those TPS reports on fire, friends
Josh Dean and Ashlee Vance<br>May 21, 2026
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It’s with great pleasure that we present this excerpt from The Impossible Factory by Josh Dean. It’s a tremendous, new book about Kelly Johnson and Lockheed Skunk Works.<br>Copyright 2026 by Josh Dean. Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.<br>Kelly Johnson knew that engineers, especially those in defense contracting, had a responsibility to understand and predict the market. No commercial enterprise that lives at the bleeding edge of technology can survive for long if it doesn’t anticipate the needs of its buyers far in advance. So, Kelly was constantly talking to his contacts in the Defense Department and in the national intelligence establishment about the global chessboard and the challenges that lay ahead.<br>He caught wind of a “desperate need” for a new type of American aircraft before anyone asked him for it—one that “could safely fly over the USSR” and bring back critical information on Russia’s missile capability and other details about its defenses and military infrastructure.
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On May Day 1954, the Soviets unveiled their latest nuclear bomber—the Myasishchev M‑4 “Hammer”—which soared low over Red Square, creating quite a stir in Washington, especially because it hadn’t even been a year since the USSR had detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb.<br>Top officials—including, if not especially, President Dwight Eisenhower—were particularly worried about the Soviet Union’s strategic bombers, like the Hammer, which could carry nuclear weapons and which U.S. military and intelligence leaders knew almost nothing about: a type of plane that would potentially allow for a Pearl Harbor–style sneak attack, but far worse.<br>In the spring of 1954, Eisenhower asked James Killian, president of MIT, to form a committee to make recommendations for how the United States could leverage its tremendous base of scientific and technological firepower to determine what the Soviet military was capable of—and as a result, how much danger America was truly in.
A subcommittee was told to “find ways to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based, to provide better strategic warning, to minimize surprise in the kind of attack, and to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross underestimation of the threat.” No pressure there.<br>The United States and the Soviet Union were still in the early days of a nuclear arms race, and any edge in that race created leverage in the battle for global supremacy. But there was a fundamental imbalance when it came to intelligence gathering. As a free and open society, the United States was susceptible to on‑the‑ground spying. But the Soviet Union, being a closed, authoritarian state, was nearly impossible to infiltrate with spies.<br>To make up for that, the United States had to be creative. It would need to use science and technology to out‑spy the Russians. And if American spies couldn’t get into the Soviet Union to gather intel, they’d have to fly over it, which presented its own challenges. Like being shot down.<br>The design challenge facing Kelly Johnson, then, was daunting: To safely overfly the Soviet Union and take high‑quality photos undetected required a plane that could fly more than four thousand miles without refueling, and reach at least 70,000 feet—beyond the reach of Soviet air defenses and so high that it wouldn’t create vapor trails, thus revealing itself.<br>In short, this plane would need to be extremely light, while carrying an array of the most advanced cameras, sensors, and navigational gear available.<br>The need was also urgent. Existentially so.<br>That March, Kelly submitted Lockheed Report #9732 for an ultralight, high‑flying surveillance plane with an enormous wingspan to the Air Force.<br>The pitch was radical in that the plane Kelly was proposing had no landing gear, to save weight. Being as light as possible is mission critical for flying high, so Kelly was looking for weight savings wherever he could find it and decided that his plane would drop its gear upon takeoff and land on a reinforced belly.<br>The pitch was not a hit. Kelly received a letter from the Air Force declining the proposal “on the basis that [the concept] was too unusual.”<br>But one Air Force official loved the idea: Trevor Gardner, the “technologically evangelical” assistant secretary for research and development. Gardner knew of a different buyer who might be interested and summoned Kelly to Washington in November for an urgent meeting.<br>On November 19, Kelly met with a group of officers, engineers, and scientists, and endured a grilling that reminded him of his college days.<br>Shortly thereafter, top officials took the proposal to Eisenhower in person, because the president feared leaks and the...