Monday, November 30, 2009
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
KCTS9: Neil Degrasse Tyson
(1:20)
EC: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much for being here on Conversations. Welcome to Seattle.
NT: Thank you for having me.
EC: Again, I’m sure you have been here numerous times.
NT: It’s one of my favorite cities actually.
EC: Well how does of a kid born in the Bronx end of becoming an astrophysicist?
NT: First you have to say this: Da Bronx.
EC: Da Bronx, I’m sorry…
NT: Just get that straight, all right?
EC: Forgot the “Da.”
NT: Actually I’ve thought long and hard about this, because I wondered, suppose I grew up in the suburb—or if I grew up in a rural setting on a farm, where the night sky was always visible for me from childhood , from infancy. I wonder if it would have ever struck me as boldly as it did in New York, because in New York there is no sky. You can see the moon, ok, of course the sun in the day time… …the moon and maybe a couple of planets at night—that’s it, that’s our total encounter with the night sky as a New Yorker. Even when you look up your sight line mostly will hit a building – so you have to look straight up before you see the sky and it’s not interesting at that point, the lights are too bright.
So it was not until I was nine years old where my family, my parents, took me and my brother and sister to the local planetarium. In New York City, that’s the Hayden Planetarium and that’s when they dim the lights and the stars came out in this unusual ceiling that was round , this domed ceiling , and I didn’t know where I was. It was a little frightening at first, because the room kind of disappears from under you, I mean psychologically, it disappears and it’s just you and the cosmos, I thought it was hoax. I said there aren’t this many stars in the nights sky, because I know , I’ve seen them from the Bronx, It was like five stars in the Bronx, and it would not be ’til several years later where I would actually go in to the rural parts of, on that time, Pennsylvania and also in the Caribbean.
We took some family trips there, and I saw the night sky, as it was intended to be seen. To this day I’m embarrassed to confess that when I look up to the night sky with some finest observing locations in the world, I still say to myself, that’s beautiful, reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. I know that’s a little sick to think like of an artificially produced sky as the reality, the reference, but that’s what it was, but it hit me when I was nine years old and I was star struck, now, suppose I’d seen it my whole life I don’t think I would have been that star struck, and I wonder what I be today where it would not… for that delay in that cosmic encounter.
EC: And Hayden Planetarium is your life’s work now?
NT: Yeah, so now I came back and now I’m like head of the place. (laughs)
EC: Were you always good at math and science?
NT: I liked it and my grades were always all over the places, so people always put so much emphasis on grades when of course in adulthood no one asks you what your GPA was, most like times someone asked you what grade…
EC: I can’t remember…
NT: I couldn’t even remember, so clearly there is something else that matters in life than what your grades are and I think there is not enough support of what could easily recognized in someone as ambition, the urge to want to learn more no matter what is your situation, so there I was, my first encounter with a night sky, and the years that followed in to middle school and into the high school, I joined the amateur astronomers club and I attended extra classes at the museum that contained the Hayden Planetarium. Because once you go to just the public exhibits it’s a point where you want more. In any good museum any good facility, will have programs that go beyond just the permanent exhibit as did the American Museum of Natural History, of which the Hayden planetarium is a, is a part.
And so I just kept growing and I kept growing—that’s not even in school, I’m out of school doing this, after schools, on the weekends. And so, I felt fortunate to be near a facility, as so many people are who live in cities that have science museums, to live near facility that could keep stoking this curiosity, this cosmic curiosity that was planted at age nine.
EC: Not a lot of African Americans in Astronomy…
NT: That’s right. There is about, when I got my Ph.D. in 1991, there was about fifteen, in the world and…out of about 2 or 3,000 astrophysicists. There is more today. Last time I checked it might be 50 or 60, but the total number of astrophysicists has gone up in that same proportion so the relative numbers haven’t changed much.. I don’t have an easy explanation for that, I could make up one…but it’s not for the benefit of research , I think what a luxury it is to say I want to study astrophysics, suppose, you’re the first of your generation to go…… the first in your family line to go to college, and every one sort of bucking for you. Are you going to major in something as obscure as astrophysics, if you were the first to go to the college, when being financially stable is going to be a high priority for the whole family lineage at that point? So I think it might take a couple of generations before sort of financial stability is established within the community, the demographic… …before someone who is born in to a family that doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, then have a luxury of thinking about what to study just because it’s fun to do, rather than they need to draw a pay check.
EC: Now did I read?
NT: No, [laughs] the way you started so…the way…no—
EC: Was it the week you were born, that NASA was founded?
NT: Yes, the very same week, the same week that it was founded, the actual week, of the actual year that I was born NASA was founded, I should say that in reverse… And there’s been some talk - your name has been debated about as may be a candidate to the head NASA. Well, there are rumors, I mean the rumors are true, that doesn’t make them factual…there are true lies. I mean my name has come up on lists, but I didn’t put my hat in the ring,I mean I’m not , I’m not bucking for the job, there’re people who want that job.
EC: Do you?
NT: You know, if I’m asked, I’d be flattered. I’d be happy to go to Washington and have that conversation but I don’t, I am doing—I have to ask myself—we all love NASA , we all want NASA to succeed and those who don’t love NASA … don’t know enough NASA to understand why they should, I can tell you that right now. NASA is one of the few agencies where one’s support for it is uncorrelated with your political lineage, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, centrist…
People who would rather spend their money other ways, it doesn’t—whatever that urge, it does not correlate with their political platform. All I can say is, I have to ask myself, where I can do best for NASA. Is it as head of NASA, which is this huge ship, with this inertia—decades of inertia—in motion. With the man program, and the science program, and the centers. NASA has all these centers across the country, from the jet propulsion labs and…Houston, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space center, the headquarters and NASA Stennis, all across the country. It’s a huge, huge multi-headed beast that’s there. And you gotta tame it and drive it all into a direction so that it’s all coherent. And that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do. And there are people who want to try to take that on, and I deeply respect that. I don’t know if being head of NASA is the best way to use my portfolio of talents in the service of NASA. As it is now, they publish my op-eds…and they, my books get out there. And I, and I can, I have a TV show, NOVA Science Now, where NASA subjects are major recurring themes within it. On PBS of course! So, I couldn’t do that if I was head of NASA. And if I became head of NASA, who would then do that? Whereas I can continue to do this while someone else heads NASA. So that’s why I’m not, if I’m not called, I’m not going to miss it. But I nonetheless wish NASA well.
EC: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Although a lot of kids are holding you accountable after this book.
NT: Pluto had it coming! Let’s establish that, here and now. I’ve been blamed for like kicking Pluto out of the solar system. But don’t…don’t shoot the messenger.
EC: Are you guilty of killing Pluto?
NT: I’m an accessory to it. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
EC: So let’s go back…
NT: I drove the car. I drove the getaway car.
EC: [Laughs] You were the driver! You were the driver!
NT: That’s all I was!
EC: So let’s go back to 2000, and at the planetarium, this exhibit’s going to come out…
NT: Newly built, newly invested facility. Rose Center for Earth and Space.
EC: And actually things were pretty low-key when this exhibit opened. Then the NYTimes came out with this article…
NT: [low voice] The New York Times did it, that’s right, don’t blame me the New York Times…so in the 1990s we’re designing this new facility, and we’re thinking to ourselves, what’s, is there any new way we should think about delivering the universe to the public? It’s not just the planetarium, there’s a whole surrounding museum of the universe, that’s there. Part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. So we noticed that in the 1990s, new objects were being discovered at a rapid pace in the outer solar system, beyond Neptune. In orbits that kind of resembled Pluto’s orbit. Objects of sizes that resembled Pluto’s size, that were little. Objects that were mostly ice by volume, like Pluto. And we said, Hmm. Things that make you go—raise an eyebrow, wonder what’s going on out there. Maybe Pluto is a member of this new class of objects that are now being discovered. So while Pluto has always been kind of an oddball ninth planet, it’s actually quite natural in its properties when considered among what we have found in the outer solar system. So all we did was take Pluto and group it with all these other newly discovered objects. We took the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—grouped them together.
Took the, the, rocky terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—grouped them together. The asteroid belt, grouped that together. And that presented a new family photo of the solar system. We didn’t count planets, we didn’t say there are only eight planets in the solar system—that’s what we got stereotyped as doing. And I kept, people kept trying to get a quote out of me—so how many planets are there? And I said, I don’t care how many planets there are, that’s not how we’re delivering the science, pedagogically or scientifically. Taking what I felt was the high road, which was no longer counting objects. There’s no science in the numerical count of planets. There is science in the properties they have, that you can compare and contrast among the whole portfolio that is the family of the solar system.
EC: So did you expect this when you came out with the exhibit…to take off and become the center of a controversy?
NT: It didn’t take off! For a whole year. Not initially, like you were saying. It was…people seemed pretty cool about it. Until the
EC: New York Times a year later...
NT: …someone at the New York Times spotted this, and overheard some kid trying to find Pluto in the groupings of the gas giants and the rocky inner planets and couldn’t find Pluto. It’s not going to be there ’cause there’s four of these and four of these and Pluto is not either of those. And so they overheard this and said, Oh we’ve got a story here. So they got on the horn, called headquarters—downtown in New York, in Times Square, Times headquarters—
EC: Pluto’s missing!
NT: Pluto’s missing, send up a reporter and a photographer…and there they came, and right there came the headline: “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York.” And that’s when the hate mail started coming from kinder—from third graders, coming into my office. [mimics kids] Dear Dr. Tyson, why, put my favorite planet back in, why did you take it away? (in crayon, right?) Here’s what Pluto looks like, in case you don’t know—write back soon. One of them said, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet. The cutest things. But I realized this struck a chord.
There’s this, there’s this, correspondence, there’s this, this permanence of knowledge that people believe this count of planets means to them. And they’re getting conflicting information and they’re upset by this. And I could not otherwise account for it other than to say to myself, Why are Americans reacting this way, in ways that Europeans are not? And I looked around and said, Is there anything else named Pluto?
EC: Think it all had to do with the name? Particularly for kids?
NT: I think so. Even though an American discovered Pluto, you could argue maybe Americans would be a little more jingoistic about it, but I polled people who are Pluto lovers, and they said, “No idea.” So…maybe ten percent of them knew that an American discovered it. So that was not the driver of this American sentiment. And I have to conclude that it was just the dog. There it is, the dog. That was the beginning and end of that.
EC: But I would think…
NT: Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Just to flesh that out. First sketched the same year Pluto the cosmic object was discovered. So they have the same tenure in the hearts and minds of Americans.
EC: But in a way, as much as it became a controversy…and kind of humorous to some extent too.
NT: Yeah, I mean, no one, no one you know went to duel over this. But it was nonetheless, emotions were flowing, people chose up sides.
EC: But wasn’t it a good thing…you got to write a book about it…but…
NT: The book was catharsis for me. Not that I got to write it, I HAD to, otherwise I would’ve gone insane.
EC: But it brought this focus for kids, and other people, on science, the universe, all those things that that’s what you want.
NT: It’s true. I like science literary in a population, whether or not it’s astrophysics, chemistry, or biology, it doesn’t matter to me where it derives. But it made cosmic subjects front page story for many years, and particularly when an official vote was taken by the international community of astrophysicists…in 2006—that’s now six year delay—we did it first, we were the first public institution to re-think Pluto’s public identity. It came to an official vote later on, which created another media storm at that time, but now it was not focused on what we did—because this was a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union—not a labor union in that sense, it’s a society of astrophysicists. They took a vote, in Prague, so all the press went to Prague for that. I was home, doing a backstroke, I was fine because I was not the focus of this. And the vote came down to redefine the word “planet” in such a way that Pluto does not apply.
EC: But what you’re really doing here in this book is explaining how all of this came about.
NT: Exactly. The book is not some diatribe. Most of the book is a celebration of the public’s reaction to this, this Pluto controversy.
EC: In a lighthearted way…
NT: I think so, I think so, yes. You get the science and you get the back story.
EC: What is all this stuff you have in here about Pluto water…
NT: Back in the 1920s, just in the decade that preceded the discovery of Pluto—an American discovered Pluto but an American didn’t name it, nor could an American have named it—because it was a widely advertised, heavily used mineral laxative, called Pluto Water, with the logo: “When nature won’t, Pluto will.” No one’s thinking cosmic object at that time. So in fact it got named by an 11-year-old girl in England, who happened to be very well connected by the way… Her father was like head of the Cambridge Library, friends of the Astronomer Royal, so and she’d just learned about Roman mythology and saw that Pluto was far and distant and underworld—so she nailed it I think, in that effort.
EC: With the work you do…the writing, appearances…are you trying to open people’s minds to science, to the universe? For a lot of kids…science is an intimidating thing.
NT: Well I think it’s intimidating because people believe that they won’t be good at it, or they won’t understand it. And no one likes not understanding something—it’s frustrating, it can be embarrassing. And I think there are levels of approaching science. I think of science as this ladder, and it can go very high, to the point where every next rung fewer and fewer people understand what’s going on that rung until you get to some top rung, where you get the three people in the world who know what’s going on there. But the rungs go all the way down. And my concern is people not even approaching the ladder at all. And I think there are plenty of rungs there that are well within reach, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds. And a lot of what I do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on in the minds of people in the public—what their different backgrounds are, what TV shows do they watch, what books do they read. And that’s the profile of the wiring of the brain of an audience. And I go into an audience as best as I can with an understanding of that brain wiring. And I take, find out, which rungs on that ladder best fit that audience. And then they’re grabbing at the rungs, and they feel like they’re connected to the cosmos. Or at least they behave—they behave like they seem like they know what’s going on.
[Laughs] So that’s a good feeling. It says that there is a way that the science that’s around us can become part of the—just part of what you think of as life. Rather than, Now I’m about to do science. No, no—science is just there all the time. All the time. There’s ice melting in my water glass here. There’s hot air rising up from the hot lamps. There’s always something going on around you that’s science. It’s not something separate—it is life.
EC: Carl Sagan.
NT: Carl Sagan. I met him like only four times in my life, but three of them were significant. The fourth was just sort of a brief encounter—[but three] were significant. I, coming out of high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science—I grew up in the Bronx)—
EC: Da Bronx.
NT: Da Bronx, thanks for correcting me. By the way, the most formative years of my life were at the Bronx High School of Science. This is a school that has seven Nobel laureates counted among its graduates. So there’s a legacy there. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with the teachers. It really has to do with just the general environment that you’re in, where everyone cares about learning. This was back when being a nerd was not something that got the respect that it does today – because today the nerds fix your computer. Back then you didn’t have a computer for them to fix, ok?
Today if you’re not in arm’s reach of a nerd you’re missing out on something that’s going on with the technology around you. So I applied to colleges, got accepted at Cornell. A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan. He was already famous at the time, he’d done the Tonight Show. He said, I noticed you’re very interested in the universe. If you’re thinking of coming to Cornell, come by. If you come by I’ll be glad to meet you and show you the lab. I’m thinking, Carl Sagan?
So I went up to visit Cornell, he met me outside the lab, showed me his office. Reached behind, and pulled out one of his books, signed it to me. Cool—just reached there and get one of your books just sitting on the shelf. Took me, spent half the day with me. Took me back to the bus station—it’s a bus ride from New York City, four hour bus ride from New York City—started to snow, and he said if the bus doesn’t get through, here’s my home number, come and spend the night. I’m thinking, Who am I? Here’s a famous guy, brilliant scientist, who am I to him?—other than someone with ambition? And to this day—I remember then, I said to myself, if I am ever in a position of influencing others the way he’s influencing me, I’m going to do that.
And so, here I am now a scientist and I’ve got books on the back shelf, I can now do that. I’ve got the books on the back shelf and when students send me e-mail—which would not have happened back then of course, there was no e-mail—they’re the first e-mails I reply to. I have this commitment to this next generation of people in the educational pipeline that was instilled in—within me—simply because Carl Sagan spent time on me and I was nobody.
EC: Isaac Newton.
NT: Isaac Newton—smartest guy there ever was. I’ll make my replies shorter because you said you wanted this to be faster. Smartest guy there ever was, bar none, I don’t care who—Leonardo, Einstein, I don’t care who you say—Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion. One of them is the seatbelt law, by the way: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by outside force. People who don’t wear seatbelts never learn that law, right? See so physics can prolong your life!
The laws of gravitation. A friend of his says, why are they orbiting in ellipses, in that shape—planets, ’cause they’re not circles, they’re an ellipse, a flattened circle. [He says] I’ll get back to you. Goes home for a couple of months, comes back: Here’s why. Conic sections—you cut a cone and you get the shape. Well, how did you get that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to solve that problem. The guy—and then he turned 26.
EC: Oh my gosh.
NT: Isaac Newton. I can’t read about him without the hair standing up on the back of my—if I had hair there it would be standing up on the back of my neck. It’s spooky how connected to the universe he was.
EC: You’re the father of two children.
NT: Yeah, one aged now eight, and twelve.
EC: Are they interested in science?
NT: I don’t press it on them. I’ll tell you this, by the time I’m done with them they’ll be scientifically literate…whether or not they want to become scientists. In fact if you ask them today…my daughter wants to be a novelist - very much not a scientist - It’s something else completely. But I can tell you this, she’s scientifically literate. And the science literary is coming from the—how I immerse them in their environment at home, when we travel. What surrounds them that forces them to think about how the world works. And I’m actually doing a study on them about the causes and effects of these—of the environment versus how they think.
People think science literacy is being able to recite facts—how long does it take for the moon to go around the earth, how does your microwave oven work. And it’s not that. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part is how do you look at the world. What lens, what does the world look like through your lens. If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening, there’s a lot of things we understand out there! And that understanding empowers you – to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second, it’s a, there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you’re not scientifically literate, you are in a sense disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process. And you don’t even know it. So, whatever my kids become, I want them to become scientifically literate.
EC: Well I think they have a heck of a mentor. Your book again, is called the Pluto Files, one of many books that you’ve written. Plus Nova Science well.
NT: Thank you very much.
EC: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much for being here on Conversations. Welcome to Seattle.
NT: Thank you for having me.
EC: Again, I’m sure you have been here numerous times.
NT: It’s one of my favorite cities actually.
EC: Well how does of a kid born in the Bronx end of becoming an astrophysicist?
NT: First you have to say this: Da Bronx.
EC: Da Bronx, I’m sorry…
NT: Just get that straight, all right?
EC: Forgot the “Da.”
NT: Actually I’ve thought long and hard about this, because I wondered, suppose I grew up in the suburb—or if I grew up in a rural setting on a farm, where the night sky was always visible for me from childhood , from infancy. I wonder if it would have ever struck me as boldly as it did in New York, because in New York there is no sky. You can see the moon, ok, of course the sun in the day time… …the moon and maybe a couple of planets at night—that’s it, that’s our total encounter with the night sky as a New Yorker. Even when you look up your sight line mostly will hit a building – so you have to look straight up before you see the sky and it’s not interesting at that point, the lights are too bright.
So it was not until I was nine years old where my family, my parents, took me and my brother and sister to the local planetarium. In New York City, that’s the Hayden Planetarium and that’s when they dim the lights and the stars came out in this unusual ceiling that was round , this domed ceiling , and I didn’t know where I was. It was a little frightening at first, because the room kind of disappears from under you, I mean psychologically, it disappears and it’s just you and the cosmos, I thought it was hoax. I said there aren’t this many stars in the nights sky, because I know , I’ve seen them from the Bronx, It was like five stars in the Bronx, and it would not be ’til several years later where I would actually go in to the rural parts of, on that time, Pennsylvania and also in the Caribbean.
We took some family trips there, and I saw the night sky, as it was intended to be seen. To this day I’m embarrassed to confess that when I look up to the night sky with some finest observing locations in the world, I still say to myself, that’s beautiful, reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. I know that’s a little sick to think like of an artificially produced sky as the reality, the reference, but that’s what it was, but it hit me when I was nine years old and I was star struck, now, suppose I’d seen it my whole life I don’t think I would have been that star struck, and I wonder what I be today where it would not… for that delay in that cosmic encounter.
EC: And Hayden Planetarium is your life’s work now?
NT: Yeah, so now I came back and now I’m like head of the place. (laughs)
EC: Were you always good at math and science?
NT: I liked it and my grades were always all over the places, so people always put so much emphasis on grades when of course in adulthood no one asks you what your GPA was, most like times someone asked you what grade…
EC: I can’t remember…
NT: I couldn’t even remember, so clearly there is something else that matters in life than what your grades are and I think there is not enough support of what could easily recognized in someone as ambition, the urge to want to learn more no matter what is your situation, so there I was, my first encounter with a night sky, and the years that followed in to middle school and into the high school, I joined the amateur astronomers club and I attended extra classes at the museum that contained the Hayden Planetarium. Because once you go to just the public exhibits it’s a point where you want more. In any good museum any good facility, will have programs that go beyond just the permanent exhibit as did the American Museum of Natural History, of which the Hayden planetarium is a, is a part.
And so I just kept growing and I kept growing—that’s not even in school, I’m out of school doing this, after schools, on the weekends. And so, I felt fortunate to be near a facility, as so many people are who live in cities that have science museums, to live near facility that could keep stoking this curiosity, this cosmic curiosity that was planted at age nine.
EC: Not a lot of African Americans in Astronomy…
NT: That’s right. There is about, when I got my Ph.D. in 1991, there was about fifteen, in the world and…out of about 2 or 3,000 astrophysicists. There is more today. Last time I checked it might be 50 or 60, but the total number of astrophysicists has gone up in that same proportion so the relative numbers haven’t changed much.. I don’t have an easy explanation for that, I could make up one…but it’s not for the benefit of research , I think what a luxury it is to say I want to study astrophysics, suppose, you’re the first of your generation to go…… the first in your family line to go to college, and every one sort of bucking for you. Are you going to major in something as obscure as astrophysics, if you were the first to go to the college, when being financially stable is going to be a high priority for the whole family lineage at that point? So I think it might take a couple of generations before sort of financial stability is established within the community, the demographic… …before someone who is born in to a family that doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, then have a luxury of thinking about what to study just because it’s fun to do, rather than they need to draw a pay check.
EC: Now did I read?
NT: No, [laughs] the way you started so…the way…no—
EC: Was it the week you were born, that NASA was founded?
NT: Yes, the very same week, the same week that it was founded, the actual week, of the actual year that I was born NASA was founded, I should say that in reverse… And there’s been some talk - your name has been debated about as may be a candidate to the head NASA. Well, there are rumors, I mean the rumors are true, that doesn’t make them factual…there are true lies. I mean my name has come up on lists, but I didn’t put my hat in the ring,I mean I’m not , I’m not bucking for the job, there’re people who want that job.
EC: Do you?
NT: You know, if I’m asked, I’d be flattered. I’d be happy to go to Washington and have that conversation but I don’t, I am doing—I have to ask myself—we all love NASA , we all want NASA to succeed and those who don’t love NASA … don’t know enough NASA to understand why they should, I can tell you that right now. NASA is one of the few agencies where one’s support for it is uncorrelated with your political lineage, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, centrist…
People who would rather spend their money other ways, it doesn’t—whatever that urge, it does not correlate with their political platform. All I can say is, I have to ask myself, where I can do best for NASA. Is it as head of NASA, which is this huge ship, with this inertia—decades of inertia—in motion. With the man program, and the science program, and the centers. NASA has all these centers across the country, from the jet propulsion labs and…Houston, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space center, the headquarters and NASA Stennis, all across the country. It’s a huge, huge multi-headed beast that’s there. And you gotta tame it and drive it all into a direction so that it’s all coherent. And that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do. And there are people who want to try to take that on, and I deeply respect that. I don’t know if being head of NASA is the best way to use my portfolio of talents in the service of NASA. As it is now, they publish my op-eds…and they, my books get out there. And I, and I can, I have a TV show, NOVA Science Now, where NASA subjects are major recurring themes within it. On PBS of course! So, I couldn’t do that if I was head of NASA. And if I became head of NASA, who would then do that? Whereas I can continue to do this while someone else heads NASA. So that’s why I’m not, if I’m not called, I’m not going to miss it. But I nonetheless wish NASA well.
EC: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Although a lot of kids are holding you accountable after this book.
NT: Pluto had it coming! Let’s establish that, here and now. I’ve been blamed for like kicking Pluto out of the solar system. But don’t…don’t shoot the messenger.
EC: Are you guilty of killing Pluto?
NT: I’m an accessory to it. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
EC: So let’s go back…
NT: I drove the car. I drove the getaway car.
EC: [Laughs] You were the driver! You were the driver!
NT: That’s all I was!
EC: So let’s go back to 2000, and at the planetarium, this exhibit’s going to come out…
NT: Newly built, newly invested facility. Rose Center for Earth and Space.
EC: And actually things were pretty low-key when this exhibit opened. Then the NYTimes came out with this article…
NT: [low voice] The New York Times did it, that’s right, don’t blame me the New York Times…so in the 1990s we’re designing this new facility, and we’re thinking to ourselves, what’s, is there any new way we should think about delivering the universe to the public? It’s not just the planetarium, there’s a whole surrounding museum of the universe, that’s there. Part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. So we noticed that in the 1990s, new objects were being discovered at a rapid pace in the outer solar system, beyond Neptune. In orbits that kind of resembled Pluto’s orbit. Objects of sizes that resembled Pluto’s size, that were little. Objects that were mostly ice by volume, like Pluto. And we said, Hmm. Things that make you go—raise an eyebrow, wonder what’s going on out there. Maybe Pluto is a member of this new class of objects that are now being discovered. So while Pluto has always been kind of an oddball ninth planet, it’s actually quite natural in its properties when considered among what we have found in the outer solar system. So all we did was take Pluto and group it with all these other newly discovered objects. We took the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—grouped them together.
Took the, the, rocky terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—grouped them together. The asteroid belt, grouped that together. And that presented a new family photo of the solar system. We didn’t count planets, we didn’t say there are only eight planets in the solar system—that’s what we got stereotyped as doing. And I kept, people kept trying to get a quote out of me—so how many planets are there? And I said, I don’t care how many planets there are, that’s not how we’re delivering the science, pedagogically or scientifically. Taking what I felt was the high road, which was no longer counting objects. There’s no science in the numerical count of planets. There is science in the properties they have, that you can compare and contrast among the whole portfolio that is the family of the solar system.
EC: So did you expect this when you came out with the exhibit…to take off and become the center of a controversy?
NT: It didn’t take off! For a whole year. Not initially, like you were saying. It was…people seemed pretty cool about it. Until the
EC: New York Times a year later...
NT: …someone at the New York Times spotted this, and overheard some kid trying to find Pluto in the groupings of the gas giants and the rocky inner planets and couldn’t find Pluto. It’s not going to be there ’cause there’s four of these and four of these and Pluto is not either of those. And so they overheard this and said, Oh we’ve got a story here. So they got on the horn, called headquarters—downtown in New York, in Times Square, Times headquarters—
EC: Pluto’s missing!
NT: Pluto’s missing, send up a reporter and a photographer…and there they came, and right there came the headline: “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York.” And that’s when the hate mail started coming from kinder—from third graders, coming into my office. [mimics kids] Dear Dr. Tyson, why, put my favorite planet back in, why did you take it away? (in crayon, right?) Here’s what Pluto looks like, in case you don’t know—write back soon. One of them said, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet. The cutest things. But I realized this struck a chord.
There’s this, there’s this, correspondence, there’s this, this permanence of knowledge that people believe this count of planets means to them. And they’re getting conflicting information and they’re upset by this. And I could not otherwise account for it other than to say to myself, Why are Americans reacting this way, in ways that Europeans are not? And I looked around and said, Is there anything else named Pluto?
EC: Think it all had to do with the name? Particularly for kids?
NT: I think so. Even though an American discovered Pluto, you could argue maybe Americans would be a little more jingoistic about it, but I polled people who are Pluto lovers, and they said, “No idea.” So…maybe ten percent of them knew that an American discovered it. So that was not the driver of this American sentiment. And I have to conclude that it was just the dog. There it is, the dog. That was the beginning and end of that.
EC: But I would think…
NT: Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Just to flesh that out. First sketched the same year Pluto the cosmic object was discovered. So they have the same tenure in the hearts and minds of Americans.
EC: But in a way, as much as it became a controversy…and kind of humorous to some extent too.
NT: Yeah, I mean, no one, no one you know went to duel over this. But it was nonetheless, emotions were flowing, people chose up sides.
EC: But wasn’t it a good thing…you got to write a book about it…but…
NT: The book was catharsis for me. Not that I got to write it, I HAD to, otherwise I would’ve gone insane.
EC: But it brought this focus for kids, and other people, on science, the universe, all those things that that’s what you want.
NT: It’s true. I like science literary in a population, whether or not it’s astrophysics, chemistry, or biology, it doesn’t matter to me where it derives. But it made cosmic subjects front page story for many years, and particularly when an official vote was taken by the international community of astrophysicists…in 2006—that’s now six year delay—we did it first, we were the first public institution to re-think Pluto’s public identity. It came to an official vote later on, which created another media storm at that time, but now it was not focused on what we did—because this was a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union—not a labor union in that sense, it’s a society of astrophysicists. They took a vote, in Prague, so all the press went to Prague for that. I was home, doing a backstroke, I was fine because I was not the focus of this. And the vote came down to redefine the word “planet” in such a way that Pluto does not apply.
EC: But what you’re really doing here in this book is explaining how all of this came about.
NT: Exactly. The book is not some diatribe. Most of the book is a celebration of the public’s reaction to this, this Pluto controversy.
EC: In a lighthearted way…
NT: I think so, I think so, yes. You get the science and you get the back story.
EC: What is all this stuff you have in here about Pluto water…
NT: Back in the 1920s, just in the decade that preceded the discovery of Pluto—an American discovered Pluto but an American didn’t name it, nor could an American have named it—because it was a widely advertised, heavily used mineral laxative, called Pluto Water, with the logo: “When nature won’t, Pluto will.” No one’s thinking cosmic object at that time. So in fact it got named by an 11-year-old girl in England, who happened to be very well connected by the way… Her father was like head of the Cambridge Library, friends of the Astronomer Royal, so and she’d just learned about Roman mythology and saw that Pluto was far and distant and underworld—so she nailed it I think, in that effort.
EC: With the work you do…the writing, appearances…are you trying to open people’s minds to science, to the universe? For a lot of kids…science is an intimidating thing.
NT: Well I think it’s intimidating because people believe that they won’t be good at it, or they won’t understand it. And no one likes not understanding something—it’s frustrating, it can be embarrassing. And I think there are levels of approaching science. I think of science as this ladder, and it can go very high, to the point where every next rung fewer and fewer people understand what’s going on that rung until you get to some top rung, where you get the three people in the world who know what’s going on there. But the rungs go all the way down. And my concern is people not even approaching the ladder at all. And I think there are plenty of rungs there that are well within reach, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds. And a lot of what I do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on in the minds of people in the public—what their different backgrounds are, what TV shows do they watch, what books do they read. And that’s the profile of the wiring of the brain of an audience. And I go into an audience as best as I can with an understanding of that brain wiring. And I take, find out, which rungs on that ladder best fit that audience. And then they’re grabbing at the rungs, and they feel like they’re connected to the cosmos. Or at least they behave—they behave like they seem like they know what’s going on.
[Laughs] So that’s a good feeling. It says that there is a way that the science that’s around us can become part of the—just part of what you think of as life. Rather than, Now I’m about to do science. No, no—science is just there all the time. All the time. There’s ice melting in my water glass here. There’s hot air rising up from the hot lamps. There’s always something going on around you that’s science. It’s not something separate—it is life.
EC: Carl Sagan.
NT: Carl Sagan. I met him like only four times in my life, but three of them were significant. The fourth was just sort of a brief encounter—[but three] were significant. I, coming out of high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science—I grew up in the Bronx)—
EC: Da Bronx.
NT: Da Bronx, thanks for correcting me. By the way, the most formative years of my life were at the Bronx High School of Science. This is a school that has seven Nobel laureates counted among its graduates. So there’s a legacy there. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with the teachers. It really has to do with just the general environment that you’re in, where everyone cares about learning. This was back when being a nerd was not something that got the respect that it does today – because today the nerds fix your computer. Back then you didn’t have a computer for them to fix, ok?
Today if you’re not in arm’s reach of a nerd you’re missing out on something that’s going on with the technology around you. So I applied to colleges, got accepted at Cornell. A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan. He was already famous at the time, he’d done the Tonight Show. He said, I noticed you’re very interested in the universe. If you’re thinking of coming to Cornell, come by. If you come by I’ll be glad to meet you and show you the lab. I’m thinking, Carl Sagan?
So I went up to visit Cornell, he met me outside the lab, showed me his office. Reached behind, and pulled out one of his books, signed it to me. Cool—just reached there and get one of your books just sitting on the shelf. Took me, spent half the day with me. Took me back to the bus station—it’s a bus ride from New York City, four hour bus ride from New York City—started to snow, and he said if the bus doesn’t get through, here’s my home number, come and spend the night. I’m thinking, Who am I? Here’s a famous guy, brilliant scientist, who am I to him?—other than someone with ambition? And to this day—I remember then, I said to myself, if I am ever in a position of influencing others the way he’s influencing me, I’m going to do that.
And so, here I am now a scientist and I’ve got books on the back shelf, I can now do that. I’ve got the books on the back shelf and when students send me e-mail—which would not have happened back then of course, there was no e-mail—they’re the first e-mails I reply to. I have this commitment to this next generation of people in the educational pipeline that was instilled in—within me—simply because Carl Sagan spent time on me and I was nobody.
EC: Isaac Newton.
NT: Isaac Newton—smartest guy there ever was. I’ll make my replies shorter because you said you wanted this to be faster. Smartest guy there ever was, bar none, I don’t care who—Leonardo, Einstein, I don’t care who you say—Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion. One of them is the seatbelt law, by the way: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by outside force. People who don’t wear seatbelts never learn that law, right? See so physics can prolong your life!
The laws of gravitation. A friend of his says, why are they orbiting in ellipses, in that shape—planets, ’cause they’re not circles, they’re an ellipse, a flattened circle. [He says] I’ll get back to you. Goes home for a couple of months, comes back: Here’s why. Conic sections—you cut a cone and you get the shape. Well, how did you get that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to solve that problem. The guy—and then he turned 26.
EC: Oh my gosh.
NT: Isaac Newton. I can’t read about him without the hair standing up on the back of my—if I had hair there it would be standing up on the back of my neck. It’s spooky how connected to the universe he was.
EC: You’re the father of two children.
NT: Yeah, one aged now eight, and twelve.
EC: Are they interested in science?
NT: I don’t press it on them. I’ll tell you this, by the time I’m done with them they’ll be scientifically literate…whether or not they want to become scientists. In fact if you ask them today…my daughter wants to be a novelist - very much not a scientist - It’s something else completely. But I can tell you this, she’s scientifically literate. And the science literary is coming from the—how I immerse them in their environment at home, when we travel. What surrounds them that forces them to think about how the world works. And I’m actually doing a study on them about the causes and effects of these—of the environment versus how they think.
People think science literacy is being able to recite facts—how long does it take for the moon to go around the earth, how does your microwave oven work. And it’s not that. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part is how do you look at the world. What lens, what does the world look like through your lens. If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening, there’s a lot of things we understand out there! And that understanding empowers you – to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second, it’s a, there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you’re not scientifically literate, you are in a sense disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process. And you don’t even know it. So, whatever my kids become, I want them to become scientifically literate.
EC: Well I think they have a heck of a mentor. Your book again, is called the Pluto Files, one of many books that you’ve written. Plus Nova Science well.
NT: Thank you very much.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
PBS: Astrospies
NARRATOR: August 18th, 1960: 100 miles above Earth, a secret race in space has started. Corona, America's first photographic spy satellite, has just been deployed. The capsule was packed with over half a mile of film. The camera could capture images of objects as small as a truck on Russian territory, at least on a clear day.
JAMES BAMFORD (Author, Body of Secrets): The satellite would be taking pictures; a parachute would open; they'd go to all this trouble of capturing this capsule that's coming back down to Earth. Aircraft would rush it from Hawaii—where they're capturing it—to Washington, where they're developing the film. And then they put it on these big light tables. And they look at these pictures and what do they have? They have pictures of the tops of clouds.
NARRATOR: It was the nuclear missile bases under those clouds that Corona was supposed to find. The smartest engineers the C.I.A. could find had gotten it off the ground, but in space it was missing a human touch. Some thought it could never work without a human at the controls, without a finger on the shutter.
GENERAL LAWRENCE SKANTZE (U.S. Air Force, Retired): The argument was that if we had a man up there, he would have more flexibility and judgment in looking at areas of interest.
NARRATOR: And spying was just one possibility.
JAMES BAMFORD: One of the more amazing documents that we got was this list of experiments. Among those were: going up there and capturing a Russian satellite, maybe knocking a Russian satellite out of orbit or completely destroying a Russian satellite.
NARRATOR: But the risk of launching astronauts on covert missions to space was enormous. Any attempt had to be kept completely secret. Only a handful of people know what really happened.
VICE ADMIRAL RICHARD TRULY (MOL Crew Member): You just couldn't tell anybody about it, nobody.
HANK HARTSFIELD: I didn't tell my wife anything. I wasn't allowed to.
RICHARD TRULY: The program is still classified.
LACHLAN "MAC" MACLEAY (MOL Crew Member): Nobody's ever told it wasn't.
NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA, a space story you've never seen, the story of the Astrospies.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H. Koch. And...
Discover new knowledge: HHMI.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
NARRATOR: May Day, 1960, the height of the Cold War, and 13 miles above the Soviet Union all systems were go.
The CIA's secret U-2 spy plane was on a mission to confirm an alarming intelligence tip. A new Soviet nuclear missile base, close to the Arctic, was about to become operational.
JAMES BAMFORD: So this made the White House very nervous. It was in a position where it could launch missiles over the North Pole, which was the shortest route from Russia to the United States.
NARRATOR: The U-2's cameras were technological marvels, but the key to the U-2's success was the pilot's ability to find and photograph the best targets.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: The Soviets, you know, would threaten us when they could get away with it, so we needed to know where their technology was. We needed to know what they were doing in the missile field, where the silos were, what kinds of missiles they had.
NARRATOR: The U-2's pilot was Francis Gary Powers. He thought if he flew above 60,000 feet he should be safe, no Soviet anti-aircraft missiles could reach him.
He was wrong.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: When Gary Powers was shot down, the President said no more U-2 over-flights.
JAMES BAMFORD: So that put the United States in a very bad position. We had these U-2s, and we couldn't fly them over the Soviet Union.
ASIF SIDDIQI (Author): You don't want to cause a provocation, and you don't want to be shot down, you know? What's the answer? Well, you go up into space.
MERCURY LAUNCH COUNTDOWN: This is Mercury Control. The countdown is now T-minus...
NARRATOR: Launch complex 5/6 at Florida's Cape Canaveral is a monument to the early days of space exploration.
MERCURY LAUNCH COUNTDOWN: ...4, 3, 2, 1, 0.
NARRATOR: Now a museum, it was once NASA's command center for the launch of Alan Shepard, America's first man in space.
MERCURY LAUNCH COUNTDOWN: All systems are go.
NARRATOR: In December, 2004, NASA special agent Dann Oakland was called over to the old blockhouse to help solve a problem.
DANN OAKLAND: ...was trying to find a key to a door that was closed for a good number of years.
NARRATOR: The lock was so old, Oakland's office was the only one that still had the master key.
DANN OAKLAND: There was no lights or anything, and we started looking around with flashlights. Buried back in the corner was a blue box.
NARRATOR: Inside the box he found something extraordinary: two spacesuits, different from any NASA spacesuits.
DANN OAKLAND: The suits were in pretty good condition, and they were just a little bit soiled. There was one that was 007 and then 008. They were just printed on the suits themselves.
NARRATOR: And there was something else that seemed strange.
DANN OAKLAND: That was a nametag that was actually on the sleeve, and it just said "Lawyer."
JAMES BAMFORD: I've been following space and espionage for a long time. And after I heard the story of Dann Oakland finding these spacesuits I thought it was extremely interesting.
NARRATOR: For James Bamford, an author and investigative reporter, that name, "Lawyer," became a window into a hidden world.
JAMES BAMFORD: There was a small article about these suits on a space Web site. And it was very curious, because if you look at the list of NASA astronauts, there's never been a NASA astronaut named Lawyer. But I did find the name Lawyer, Captain Richard E. Lawyer, on a list of pilots chosen to be part of an Air Force Space program in the 1960s.
When I looked closely at the program, I realized that it had been run by a secret agency inside the Pentagon. While I did manage to get some documents, much of the program, even 40 years later, is still officially secret.
Lawyer's name was on a list of 17 pilots who were chosen for the program. I managed to talk to him off-camera about a month before he died, and the information he gave me helped me find 10 of the other pilots who are still alive. It's an impressive group.
NARRATOR: Some of the pilots Bamford found became space shuttle astronauts. Vice Admiral Richard Truly even became the head of NASA; Lieutenant General James Abrahamson was put in charge of President Reagan's Star Wars program; General Robert Herres would become Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. None of them has ever talked publicly about the secret that ties them all together, an Air Force program called MOL. It's one of the great untold stories of the Cold War.
The story begins in January, 1964, with a new group of America's best military pilots arriving at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. They had been assigned to train at place called ARPS, the Aerospace Research Pilot School.
RICHARD TRULY: So I arrived at Edwards, into what they called ARPS—didn't know a soul.
NARRATOR: Run by Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, ARPS was a school where some military pilots, with the right stuff, were groomed to become astronauts in NASA's civilian space program. This year it was different.
RICHARD TRULY: As we went through our student year, and got toward the fall, we realized that something funny was going on. And the thing that was funny going on was, they were actually conducting a secret, I guess you'd say crew selection.
JAMES BAMFORD: Without them knowing it, they were actually competing with each other for this program. They were being watched and being evaluated by these people to see who would make the best astronauts. The program was so secret, it was even kept from the potential astronauts themselves.
KAROL "BO" BOBKO (MOL Crew Member): We'd fly in the morning, we would have classes in the afternoon, and we'd study and reduce data at night.
RICHARD TRULY: They would teach you astronomy and flight mechanics, orbital mechanics—the relationship of bodies that are in orbit, either around the Earth, or going to the Moon—stuff like that.
NARRATOR: For the students, it was more than just books and flying. They were poked and prodded, spun in centrifuges, bounced in chairs and battered with psychological testing.
RICHARD TRULY: And lo and behold, they finally came out with a list, and I was on the list. I almost fell over, I had no idea.
MAC MACLEAY: And then I had to go through a screening with a couple of other guys, to see whether I would fit. The previous height limit had been 6 feet, and I was almost 6'2". I was determined, so I pulled that helmet down so tight I was almost dying, but I just barely made it. I think there were about 100 people that started out, and to survive down to eight or so made you feel pretty good.
RICHARD TRULY: This was 1964. Nineteen sixty-four, only Mercury had flown. The Gemini astronauts were down at NASA. And here we were, going to get to fly in space, even though it was a military program. So we were sitting on the top of the anthill.
JAMES BAMFORD: And they finally did tell the people that they selected, but they only told them a cover story. They didn't tell them the real story about what they were being selected for. What they told them was that they were just going to go up to space and do experiments.
NARRATOR: Unlike U-2s or spy satellites, launching man into space just couldn't be kept secret. So a decision was made to call it a laboratory and to try hiding the project by putting it in plain sight.
NEWSCAST ANNOUNCER: Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.
NARRATOR: President Lyndon Johnson announced the program and gave it a plausible cover story, something that Americans, if not the Russians, would possibly believe.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON (President of the United States, 1963-1969 Newsclip: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am today instructing the Department of Defense to immediately proceed with the development of a Manned Orbiting Laboratory. This program will bring us new knowledge about what man is able to do in space.
NARRATOR: The cover story was that the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL, would be a space station, crewed with two military astronauts for 30-day missions. During that time, they'd perform routine experiments on themselves and test their ability to do military tasks in space. There was no mention of an operational mission, nor any hint of espionage.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The cost of developing the Manned Orbiting Laboratory will be one billion, five hundred million dollars.
NARRATOR: It took three more months until the crew was finally told their real mission.
RICHARD TRULY: And that day really was an amazing day. We got briefed into the program as to what it was about.
NARRATOR: The MOL was actually an orbital spy station, equipped with a camera the size of a car. It would fly an orbit that would give maximum coverage to Russian targets. And the crew were no longer going to be astronauts, they were going to be astrospies.
JAMES BAMFORD: In essence, they were going to become the successors to Francis Gary Powers. Basically, they are going to be the people who are going to be flying over Russia now.
MAC MACLEAY: I think everybody was tickled. I mean, it was something that we really thought would contribute. We weren't going to go check how the African fruit fly worked under zero gravity, you know, we were going to do something worthwhile—okay—that we thought was worthwhile.
ALBERT "AL" CREWS (MOL Crew Member): Before, I was going to go play with something. I wasn't really impressed by that. But now, we were going to take pictures, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: The argument was that if we had a man up there, he would have more flexibility and judgment.
NARRATOR: The plan was to launch a two-man Gemini capsule atop a 56-foot-long laboratory module. In orbit, the crew would unlock a hatch, cut into the capsule's heat shield, and crawl through a narrow tunnel into the pressurized crew compartment.
Inside, as seen in this newly discovered government film, the astrospies could look through a view-port and observe and photograph high priority targets in Russia and elsewhere. When the 30-day mission was completed, the astrospies would return to Earth in the Gemini capsule, leaving the laboratory module to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
With their highly classified mission in hand, the astrospies disappeared into a hidden world.
MAC MACLEAY: The only people you could really communicate with about what you were actually doing were people within the program office.
DONALD H. PETERSON (MOL Crew Member): And when we traveled, we didn't identify ourselves as MOL or crew members or anything else. And I think, once in a great while, we traveled on I.D. that identified us as somebody else.
BO BOBKO: We didn't go around and tell everybody, knock on everybody's door and say, "Hey, I was an astronaut."
RICHARD TRULY: Although we did have a joke in the program that one day there was going to be a little article back on page 50 of the newspaper that said, "An Unidentified Spacecraft Launched from an Unidentified Launch Pad, with Unidentified Astronauts, to do an Unidentified Mission." That's the way it was.
NARRATOR: But despite the carefully crafted cover stories, despite all the safeguards, half a world away the Russians were carefully watching and listening. And they didn't believe a word.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO (Almaz Chief Designer): We had some information about the MOL program from open and closed channels. We had our sources.
ASIF SIDDIQI: These guys in Russia were smart. They could look at MOL they could see, sort of, the general systems layout and they could tell you that this was something much more serious than simply applied military experimentation.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: Russia was being surrounded by a network of American nuclear missile bases, and we needed information on the locations of these bases. Reconnaissance from outer space was absolutely necessary.
ANATOLI BLAGOV (Almaz Designer): We faced the problem of how potential targets could be identified and located. That's how the Almaz project was born.
NARRATOR: In Russian, Almaz means "a diamond in the rough." Almaz was the code name for the Soviet spy ship, a code name that could never be spoken. Almaz was a state secret, a spacecraft the Soviets hoped would dwarf the American MOL.
ANATOLI BLAGOV: It's not just a satellite or a spaceship, it's a whole complex, a whole system, that consisted of a number of elements. Its overall weight was about 20 tons.
ASIF SIDDIQI: We are talking about two massive, you know, 20-ton spaceships, in space, docked to each other, cosmonauts photographing the Earth, perhaps even doing some sort of battle simulations.
And it wasn't just going to be bigger, it was meant to be better. Unlike the MOL, Almaz was designed to stay in orbit for years at a time. Supply ships would ferry cosmonauts and equipment back and forth on a regular basis.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: The Soviet Union, at that time, was ahead in many ways. We launched the first satellite. We had the first spaceman, so we believed we were ahead of everybody.
ASIF SIDDIQI: Almaz and MOL were, in some sense, kind of the shadow space race. It was the one without the parades.
C. GORDON FULLERTON (MOL Crew Member): It's hard to remember the sense of conflict. The Russians were the enemy. They really were.
DONALD H. PETERSON: And the game became, "We need to beat the Russians into space."
BO BOBKO: During the heart of the Cold War, we thought of this big Russian bear as being all powerful and all knowing.
AL CREWS: I was always afraid that they were ahead of us quite a bit.
ASIF SIDDIQI: You can see the timelines of these two programs, and they were very much close.
NARRATOR: Hidden from view, an intensive training program began. MOL crew members began simulating life in zero gravity.
RICHARD TRULY: We did some of the work in zero-g airplanes, particularly learning how to crawl through that hatch in the Gemini B.
NARRATOR: One task the astrospies simulated over and over was one of the most basic: going back and forth through the hatch and narrow tunnel that connected the Gemini capsule to the laboratory module.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: One would go back into the Gemini through this really awkward tunnel.
HANK HARTSFIELD: As we progressed on the program, we got better at what we were doing.
NARRATOR: In an eerie parallel world, cosmonauts were practicing exactly the same maneuvers in Russian airplanes.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: Even though there was no exchange of information between the Americans and the Soviets, we were thinking in the same direction. We also had a special hatch linking the main unit of the orbital station to the return capsule.
NARRATOR: To simulate life onboard the Almaz, Russian designers built underwater tanks with a mockup of the spaceship. There, planners had more time to study complicated maneuvers, like loading film capsules into the station.
Half a world away the Americans had developed the same solution. Former test pilot Bud Evans was put in charge of designing the underwater training program.
N.C. "BUD" EVANS (Former Test Pilot): In the airplane, when you reached zero-g and you had maybe 40 seconds to maybe a minute-fifteen seconds at the most, so you really couldn't get a timeline on how long it would take somebody to do a task. And following that, we went full bore on simulating the MOL astronauts' task under water.
JAMES BAMFORD: They created an undersea training facility off Buck Island in the Caribbean. Under water, they dropped this very large mock-up of the MOL spacecraft.
NARRATOR: In film that has never been shown publicly before, you can see MOL crewmembers first putting on scuba gear; then donning their full spacesuits.
AL CREWS: It was very similar to what it would be in space. Cutting out some of the gravity, you can't move very well.
NARRATOR: With a more complete mock-up, the MOL crewmembers practiced more mission-critical tasks, like simulating how to move the packages of exposed film back through the narrow tunnel into the Gemini capsule.
BUD EVANS: We had to know how long these tasks were going to take. This was one way to get some real timeline studies.
NARRATOR: While both the astronauts and cosmonauts were training for reconnaissance, military planners saw orbiting spy stations as just a first step.
USAF TRAINING FILM: Any nation sufficiently advanced in space technology can convert a vehicle into a military spacecraft to deny the use of space to the free world.
NARRATOR: A 1963 Air Force briefing film titled Space and National Security depicted space as a battlefield and showed just how far the military thought that battlefield might extend.
ASIF SIDDIQI: In the '60s, this was a time of big thinking, on both sides. The Russians were really thinking grand. And we're talking multiple battle stations in Earth orbit, reconnaissance stations manned by dozens and dozens of cosmonauts.
JAMES BAMFORD: One of the more amazing documents that we got was this list of experiments that were going to be used on the MOL. Among those were things that be considered outrageous today: going up there and capturing or stealing a Russian satellite, going up there and maybe knocking a Russian satellite out of orbit or completely destroying a Russian satellite.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: Of course, we did realize that the Americans tried to develop the satellite interceptors and killer satellites. So we decided to develop a special cannon that was placed on the orbiting station. We just wanted to test and see how it worked in outer space. If somebody wanted to inspect or even attack the Almaz, we could destroy it.
NARRATOR: But first, engineers and designers from both sides had to contend with some fundamental laws of physics, so that astrospies could monitor enemy territory from 100 miles in space.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: It's a mystery to most people who haven't flown in orbit what it's like trying to look at the ground as it's going by when you are going 18,000 miles an hour.
DONALD H. PETERSON: Just looking out the window with normal, or the equivalent of 20-20 vision, you could see tankers, oil tankers, in the gulf of Oman, and they looked about that big. You couldn't see anything smaller than that without magnification.
NARRATOR: The magnification system developed for MOL was the state of the art in optical engineering. The camera system and optics—an advanced set of folded mirrors tucked into the station—were so far ahead of their time that a nearly identical configuration is still in use today.
JAMES BAMFORD: So if you picture a Hubbell space telescope, this huge, bus-sized telescope in space pointed at the stars, if you just turned it around and point it towards Earth, that would be the KH-11. We had very high resolution.
NARRATOR: For photo analysts it is all a question of resolution. The higher the resolution, the smaller the object you can see on the ground. Extraordinarily, the MOL's camera was designed to spot objects as small as three inches.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: The three-inch resolution was pretty critical to providing our people with the technical details of what the threat was and what the capability was.
ASIF SIDDIQI: The goal of people who do reconnaissance has always been to get the highest resolution.
DONALD H. PETERSON: But it's a tradeoff. The tighter you get the picture, the better the resolution you get, but the less coverage you get. What you really need is to be able to look at a big scene, and say, "Oh, there's something interesting I really need to look at over there."
NARRATOR: Inside a MOL training simulator, joysticks could zoom the lens both in and out and from side to side. A wide-angle viewfinder could spot targets at the very edge.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: We had optical eyepieces to look through with ways to point the line of sight, and they had photographs simulated to give you something to look at, test your ability to zero in on a point of interest quickly and accurately.
NARRATOR: The camera system was a huge engineering challenge. It required great precision while the target was in motion and the station was orbiting over the poles.
JAMES BAMFORD: They are trying to take a picture of something on Earth, as the Earth is going around on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour and they themselves are traveling around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. It was an extremely difficult scientific task to try to create a camera system that could take a very accurate picture knowing that everything is moving at a different relationship to each other.
NARRATOR: In both countries, engineers struggled to create rudimentary motion-tracking systems.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We had other devices for reconnaissance, but we needed to create a control system that could fix the camera on the targets to avoid blur.
ASIF SIDDIQI: On Almaz, they had a particular instrument which would basically freeze the image. They would actually have the camera move and compensate for the angular distance between a particular point. So as Almaz was flying over, the camera would, sort of, shift slowly to keep its sights on a particular territory.
NARRATOR: MOL's tracking and targeting system was computerized, but computing was still in its infancy.
MAC MACLEAY: By today's standards they were really crude. They were IBM 4-PIs. I don't think they had 50,000 words of storage in them. You could actually go to I.B.M.—I actually went there and watched, believe it or not—these ladies sitting there stringing these little magnetic cores on these wires to form the memory of this thing. You've got more in your cell phone, probably, than they had in those computers.
NARRATOR: But orbiting computers and tracking systems weren't what made the MOL extraordinary.
GENERAL ROBERT HERRES (Former Vice Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff): The difference between the MOL and an unmanned system is that here's a system with people in it. People are, you know, hands-on in the spacecraft, making decisions and adjusting it and so forth. That's different.
ASIF SIDDIQI: You have to ask yourself the question: I'm investing an enormous amount of resources to maintain a crew up in space; now, what they can provide is a real-time analysis of the targets; they can look at something, they can say, "Well, this is something interesting, and we should be able to, we should find out more about this." But is it worth that amount of resources to have a crew just tell you that?
DONALD H. PETERSON: The MOL program to put human beings in orbit was going to cost more money, because everything had to be man-rated. There had to be safety features. It's extra weight; it means the vehicle has to be bigger, has to have more fuel. It just adds cost everywhere along the line.
RICHARD TRULY: MOL was a very expensive program. It seems like chicken feed today. It was a, I think it was a $3 billion program. But in the 1960s, that was a lot of money.
MAC MACLEAY: Think back in the mid- to late '60s, Johnson was the president. He was trying to fund all the Great Society programs; he was trying to fund the expansion of the war in Vietnam; he was trying to fund going to the moon on Apollo. And here we were, and we would take a cut, basically, every year. And we used to jokingly tell ourselves that the only thing that remained constant on the program was the number of days 'til the first launch.
NARRATOR: The scheduled launch date for the first MOL mission was August, 1970. The Russians planned to launch Almaz that April to commemorate Lenin's 100th birthday. But in November, 1966, the Americans seemed poised to make a huge leap forward.
At Cape Canaveral, a unique rocket configuration was rolled out to the launch pad. Atop the standard Titan IIIC solid rocket boosters was a hollow mock-up of the MOL laboratory, and atop that, workers attached an unmanned Gemini-B capsule. Designers needed to test whether the Gemini's heat shield would still work after the MOL's access hatch had been cut into it. Unlike most NASA launches, there were no astronauts on display.
RICHARD TRULY: You know, the NASA astronauts back in the '60s were all good friends of ours. We knew them all. We went to Houston, and when we went to Houston, they'd tell us all about what they were doing, and we wouldn't tell them anything about what we were doing.
MAC MACLEAY: We were different, that's all. You know, we weren't on the cover of Life magazine, we weren't driving Corvettes, we were, you know, just doing different things.
NARRATOR: At 8:50 on November 3rd, the MOL program literally got off the ground. Just over 100 miles in space, the unmanned capsule was ejected.
U.S. Navy ships recovered it 5,500 miles out in the Atlantic. The capsule was intact and proved that pilots could survive re-entry.
But surviving their training program was another question. Major Robert Lawrence was one of the final crew members chosen for MOL. He was one of the Air Force's best pilots; he had a Ph.D. in chemistry; and he was the first African-American selected to be an astronaut.
BARBARA H. LAWRENCE: Bob was such an excellent pilot that the idea of him having an accident really had never entered my mind.
DONALD H. PETERSON: They were doing a simulated shuttle approach in an F-104, which was a very difficult maneuver, and I think Harve Royer was flying the airplane. And he just misjudged a second or two, and that's, that's all you had.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: And I think they got too low, pulled out too late, actually hit the ground hard, bounced in the air and, as I understand, the airplane rolled.
DONALD H. PETERSON: And Hoyer managed to...they both ejected. Hoyer survived the ejection and Bob didn't.
BARBARA H. LAWRENCE: I was standing at home changing buttons on a dress, and I looked out the window and saw Bob Herres coming up the walk. I thought, "I don't have to ask."
That's what they call a life-changing experience you know. Suddenly, you know, in the morning everything seems okay, and then a few minutes later it's all over.
ROBERT HERRES: That morning, Bob wanted to change his flight, and wanted me to fly in his place on that particular flight. That's about all there is to say. I should have been in the back seat of that airplane instead of him.
JAMES ABRAHMSON: The accident served to make us realize that we really were a very small group. And we had a big problem. And that meant lots of training and that we expanded our efforts and increased our efforts.
NARRATOR: By the beginning of 1969, the secret race between Russia and the U.S to launch the first spies into space seemed to be neck and neck. Both sides had made significant advances, but they were both years behind schedule.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We thought that in the coming year or two, we would be able to launch the space station into orbit. Still our program fell behind by three years.
HANK HARTSFIELD: For the first time, I know I, personally, was beginning to believe. I believed this can work.
JAMES BAMFORD: While some of them might have been a bit worried about what the Russians were doing at this point, what they really didn't know was that the competition was less with the Russians than it was within their own government.
Right around the corner from them was another agency called the N.R.O., the National Reconnaissance Office. The National Reconnaissance Office was extremely secret during the 1960s. ...matter of fact, even its name wasn't de-classified until the early '90s. Their job was to try to find a way to put satellites up there that could get the very same resolution.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: They were going to develop a competitive system, and the C.I.A. backed that.
NARRATOR: Larry Skantze, who had worked at N.R.O. and later helped plan MOL, was one of the few people with a security clearance for both programs.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: Both systems were aimed at developing three-inch technical resolution. From a technical point of view, they kind of wound up in a dead heat.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: We were aware that there were unmanned reconnaissance satellites with truly impressive capability on the drawing board.
MAC MACLEAY: You know, there's the unmanned guys that said, you know, "We don't need you." And then, there's the manned guys that say, "Well, you can't live without us."
AL CREWS: Because it was obvious to me, the first time I went to a place where the unmanned system was being run; they didn't want any part of us. And somebody bigger than them told them to let us in to see it.
NARRATOR: Unknown to the MOL crew, the Secretary of the Air Force went to the White House to make a last minute plea to President Nixon, and the MOL's future hung in the balance.
For Hank Hartsfield, the morning of Tuesday, June 10th, 1969, was like any other.
HANK HARTSFIELD: I jumped in my little MG, and as usual, I had the little plug in my ear to listen to the local news, and was happily driving down 405, and they came in with an announcement.
DAVID PACKARD (Under Secretary of Defense/Audio Clip, 1969): This morning the Manned Orbiting Laboratory has been cancelled by the Department of Defense.
HANK HARTSFIELD: Holy cow! What's going on here? There was two news stations. I switched to the other one to see if the story would be any different, and it wasn't.
RICHARD TRULY: I was in a meeting, arguing with an engineer, and I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I looked around, and it was Mac. And I looked in his eyes, and he said real low, nobody else in the room heard him, he said, "The program is cancelled."
And I turned around to this engineer that I was arguing with, and I...my mind was blank. I didn't know what we'd been talking about.
REPORTER (Audio Clip, 1969): What happens to the 14 astronauts, now, who have been training for lengthy missions?
DAVID PACKARD (Under Secretary of Defense/Audio Clip, 1969): Well, they'll find, I'm sure, appropriate assignments elsewhere. They're a very good bunch of boys, and I'm sure they'll have many opportunities to use this experiment in the furtherment of their careers.
REPORTER (Audio Clip, 1969): Thank you.
NARRATOR: The end of the MOL program turned out to be as low-key as its beginning. Six weeks later the world focused on man's role in space, but they were watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.
NASA CONTROL: Oh, that looks beautiful from here, Neil.
NEIL ARMSTRONG ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE 1969: It has a stark beauty all its own.
JAMES ABRAHMSON: The world was unified at that point, and I think everybody was happy that a human being had landed on another planet. By the same token, I would say that I still cry at night, a little bit, about not getting to go.
ASIF SIDDIQI: The Americans had just landed on the moon in 1969, which was probably the greatest event in the history of space exploration, so far. The Russians had completely been upstaged; they had lost the moon race. So Dimitri Ustinov, who is basically the effective head of the Soviet space program, demands something to respond to this.
NARRATOR: This is what the Russians came up with. This is the spy station called Almaz. Thirteen years in the making, the sole remaining capsule is locked away in a warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow. It is a closed facility, a place foreigners are still denied access. NOVA's cameras were allowed inside, but only with a Russian camera crew.
The Almaz capsule was divided in three sections. One section was the crew quarters: a rudimentary bed, a table where cosmonauts could sit and prepare food, a tank to sip water from.
Another section was mainly taken up with the sensors, largest among them the Agat camera, weighing more than two tons, with six-meter mirrors folded inside; and in the middle, the operations module, where astrospies could zoom down to almost any point on Earth; to show them where they were, a simple globe that depicted their point in orbit; a screen they could look at that showed them a 100-kilometer panorama of the world below; in front of that screen, a viewfinder that could zoom in to 100 meters.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We could see details that were half a meter long from 250 kilometers in outer space. For example, we could see the make of the car, if it's a Ford or Toyota.
NARRATOR: The entire station was gyroscopically controlled, designed to pivot as it passed over its target so that when the shutter was triggered, the pictures wouldn't be blurred. And on the outside of the station, a first for manned space flight: a weapon. A 23-millimeter cannon that could fire on an enemy satellite that might be flying too close for comfort.
In June, 1974, all of this was loaded on top of a giant proton rocket and rolled out to the Baikanour launch site. The Almaz capsule was covered with a shroud so American reconnaissance satellites couldn't photograph it.
Nine days later, Colonel Pavel Popovich and his flight engineer Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Artukhin were launched into space to dock with the Almaz station. They were the first astrospies to orbit the Earth. Their mission lasted 15 days.
Valeri Romanov is a cosmonaut who trained on the Almaz program in the 1970s. Inside the command center, he demonstrates how Popovitch's mission worked.
VALERY ROMANOV (Almaz Cosmonaut): These are the synchronization levers. By pushing the button, we could switch on the camera. But the process itself went like this: here is the panoramic screen where I can see the ground beneath the station, and this is how I zoom in.
So, for example, I'm flying over the ocean and I spot a warship. I can see it's going a little bit to the right, so I can rotate the station a little to keep watching it and then film it. One, two, three, and I have a picture.
We had a special system to develop the film. You turned off all the station's lights and, in complete darkness, you put the film in the developer then moved out a projection table to fix the exposed film. Then you could select the most interesting parts and transmit it back to Earth with a video camera. So about an hour after you took a picture, people on Earth could be studying it.
Now let me show you the periscope and how it could protect you from attack. If you look through here, you can see outside the station and what's happening around it. Ground control can tell me something is going on, if something is approaching here, and that might be a killer satellite. We have the Nudelmann cannon right below the station's belly. So I try to rotate the station to face the object head-on and then feed in the command to fire. Fortunately that never happened.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We were afraid about what would happen to the station if we fired the cannon, so we never tested it with the men onboard. But after the crew left, we fired the cannon by remote control, and the station survived the intense vibration.
NARRATOR: Subsequent missions to the Almaz seemed star-crossed. On two missions, cosmonauts failed to dock with the spy station and returned to Earth empty-handed.
On the third attempt to reach Almaz, things got worse. The cosmonauts docked successfully and entered the Almaz, but on their 42nd day in orbit, as they passed over the dark side of Earth, the station's electrical systems suddenly shut down. Alarms sounded, and the station was plunged into darkness. Out of radio contact and drifting in space, the cosmonauts struggled for two hours to bring the craft back to life. When power was restored, the frailty of man in space became clear. The flight engineer suffered a breakdown and began experiencing audio hallucinations. No medicine on board could help. Six days later, the cosmonauts were ordered back to Earth.
In February, 1977, Victor Gorbatko, a Soviet air force colonel, was the last pilot to command Almaz. His mission was almost flawless.
VICTOR GORBATKO (ALMAZ Commander): When we flew over the United States, I looked down and immediately recognized New York.
We could see human beings on the streets. I would say we could see objects about one meter in size. I had enough time to count planes on the ground when we flew over military bases. We just had to shoot film of any weapons we could spot. That was about all we had to do.
NARRATOR: Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, he said, the Almaz orbit was useful not only for spying on the U.S., but also on its allies.
VICTOR GORBATKO: Our main assignment with the Agat system was to film ships and planes on the other side. There was some military tension in Israel, so we had to count how many planes they had.
NARRATOR: To Colonel Gorbatko, there was a big difference between space espionage and space wars.
VICTOR GORBATKO: My mission has a peaceful character. We didn't shoot. We just took pictures. So we were space spies. That would be a good title for your movie.
NARRATOR: But far below, in Moscow, senior Kremlin officials were asking the same question their American counterparts asked eight years before. "Was this really worth the effort and the risk?"
JAMES BAMFORD: One of the biggest ironies here was that the Russians probably felt that they won. But in the end, it was a hollow victory, because they ended up, basically, coming to the same conclusion. It just took them about a decade longer.
NARRATOR: On February 25, 1977, at 9:21 a.m., Moscow time, Colonel Gorbatko undocked from Almaz and descended toward central Kazakhstan. He and his partner would be the last astrospies.
After 13 years of extraordinary effort by scientists from both sides, with billions of rubles and billions of dollars spent, only five missions had been launched, all by the Russians. And just two of those were deemed a success. For all the effort, astrospies had managed just 81 days in orbit.
JAMES BAMFORD: In the end, it came down to a competition of man against machine, and machine won.
VICTOR GORBATKO: Still, I absolutely think it was a premature decision to close down the program. They insist the space station without the pilots are more efficient. I would insist that is wrong.
MAC MACLEAY: I thought it was a good program. I think we could have done something really worthwhile. It was aborted prematurely, as far as we were concerned.
HANK HARTSFIELD: I think it was positive. I think...I'd like to think—and I believe I'm correct—that we had a positive influence on the way things would be going in the future.
NARRATOR: Two months before the last Russian cosmonaut left the Almaz, America's National Reconnaissance Office successfully launched its first KH-11 unmanned spy satellite. Said to be capable of capturing images with 3-inch resolution, but using video sensors instead of film, this was the digital age of espionage. This was what had rendered America's astrospies obsolete before they ever flew.
30 years later, dozens of unmanned satellites silently monitor the world below. They are also the astrospies' legacy.
HANK HARTSFIELD: When I look back at what we did on MOL, we didn't, far as I know, develop something that has led to another manned system. I think that the work we did helped provide data for future systems.
ANATOLI BLAGOV: Just yesterday, I went to the Google search engine and I could actually see my own house. Thirty years ago, who would have thought I would be able to see something like that?
NARRATOR: On NOVA's Astrospies Web site, hear from the astronauts of the MOL program, see spy photos that made history, and more. Find it on PBS.org.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H. Koch. And...
Discover new knowledge: HHMI.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
To order this show or any other NOVA program, for $24.95 plus shipping and handling, call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
JAMES BAMFORD (Author, Body of Secrets): The satellite would be taking pictures; a parachute would open; they'd go to all this trouble of capturing this capsule that's coming back down to Earth. Aircraft would rush it from Hawaii—where they're capturing it—to Washington, where they're developing the film. And then they put it on these big light tables. And they look at these pictures and what do they have? They have pictures of the tops of clouds.
NARRATOR: It was the nuclear missile bases under those clouds that Corona was supposed to find. The smartest engineers the C.I.A. could find had gotten it off the ground, but in space it was missing a human touch. Some thought it could never work without a human at the controls, without a finger on the shutter.
GENERAL LAWRENCE SKANTZE (U.S. Air Force, Retired): The argument was that if we had a man up there, he would have more flexibility and judgment in looking at areas of interest.
NARRATOR: And spying was just one possibility.
JAMES BAMFORD: One of the more amazing documents that we got was this list of experiments. Among those were: going up there and capturing a Russian satellite, maybe knocking a Russian satellite out of orbit or completely destroying a Russian satellite.
NARRATOR: But the risk of launching astronauts on covert missions to space was enormous. Any attempt had to be kept completely secret. Only a handful of people know what really happened.
VICE ADMIRAL RICHARD TRULY (MOL Crew Member): You just couldn't tell anybody about it, nobody.
HANK HARTSFIELD: I didn't tell my wife anything. I wasn't allowed to.
RICHARD TRULY: The program is still classified.
LACHLAN "MAC" MACLEAY (MOL Crew Member): Nobody's ever told it wasn't.
NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA, a space story you've never seen, the story of the Astrospies.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H. Koch. And...
Discover new knowledge: HHMI.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
NARRATOR: May Day, 1960, the height of the Cold War, and 13 miles above the Soviet Union all systems were go.
The CIA's secret U-2 spy plane was on a mission to confirm an alarming intelligence tip. A new Soviet nuclear missile base, close to the Arctic, was about to become operational.
JAMES BAMFORD: So this made the White House very nervous. It was in a position where it could launch missiles over the North Pole, which was the shortest route from Russia to the United States.
NARRATOR: The U-2's cameras were technological marvels, but the key to the U-2's success was the pilot's ability to find and photograph the best targets.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: The Soviets, you know, would threaten us when they could get away with it, so we needed to know where their technology was. We needed to know what they were doing in the missile field, where the silos were, what kinds of missiles they had.
NARRATOR: The U-2's pilot was Francis Gary Powers. He thought if he flew above 60,000 feet he should be safe, no Soviet anti-aircraft missiles could reach him.
He was wrong.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: When Gary Powers was shot down, the President said no more U-2 over-flights.
JAMES BAMFORD: So that put the United States in a very bad position. We had these U-2s, and we couldn't fly them over the Soviet Union.
ASIF SIDDIQI (Author): You don't want to cause a provocation, and you don't want to be shot down, you know? What's the answer? Well, you go up into space.
MERCURY LAUNCH COUNTDOWN: This is Mercury Control. The countdown is now T-minus...
NARRATOR: Launch complex 5/6 at Florida's Cape Canaveral is a monument to the early days of space exploration.
MERCURY LAUNCH COUNTDOWN: ...4, 3, 2, 1, 0.
NARRATOR: Now a museum, it was once NASA's command center for the launch of Alan Shepard, America's first man in space.
MERCURY LAUNCH COUNTDOWN: All systems are go.
NARRATOR: In December, 2004, NASA special agent Dann Oakland was called over to the old blockhouse to help solve a problem.
DANN OAKLAND: ...was trying to find a key to a door that was closed for a good number of years.
NARRATOR: The lock was so old, Oakland's office was the only one that still had the master key.
DANN OAKLAND: There was no lights or anything, and we started looking around with flashlights. Buried back in the corner was a blue box.
NARRATOR: Inside the box he found something extraordinary: two spacesuits, different from any NASA spacesuits.
DANN OAKLAND: The suits were in pretty good condition, and they were just a little bit soiled. There was one that was 007 and then 008. They were just printed on the suits themselves.
NARRATOR: And there was something else that seemed strange.
DANN OAKLAND: That was a nametag that was actually on the sleeve, and it just said "Lawyer."
JAMES BAMFORD: I've been following space and espionage for a long time. And after I heard the story of Dann Oakland finding these spacesuits I thought it was extremely interesting.
NARRATOR: For James Bamford, an author and investigative reporter, that name, "Lawyer," became a window into a hidden world.
JAMES BAMFORD: There was a small article about these suits on a space Web site. And it was very curious, because if you look at the list of NASA astronauts, there's never been a NASA astronaut named Lawyer. But I did find the name Lawyer, Captain Richard E. Lawyer, on a list of pilots chosen to be part of an Air Force Space program in the 1960s.
When I looked closely at the program, I realized that it had been run by a secret agency inside the Pentagon. While I did manage to get some documents, much of the program, even 40 years later, is still officially secret.
Lawyer's name was on a list of 17 pilots who were chosen for the program. I managed to talk to him off-camera about a month before he died, and the information he gave me helped me find 10 of the other pilots who are still alive. It's an impressive group.
NARRATOR: Some of the pilots Bamford found became space shuttle astronauts. Vice Admiral Richard Truly even became the head of NASA; Lieutenant General James Abrahamson was put in charge of President Reagan's Star Wars program; General Robert Herres would become Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. None of them has ever talked publicly about the secret that ties them all together, an Air Force program called MOL. It's one of the great untold stories of the Cold War.
The story begins in January, 1964, with a new group of America's best military pilots arriving at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. They had been assigned to train at place called ARPS, the Aerospace Research Pilot School.
RICHARD TRULY: So I arrived at Edwards, into what they called ARPS—didn't know a soul.
NARRATOR: Run by Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, ARPS was a school where some military pilots, with the right stuff, were groomed to become astronauts in NASA's civilian space program. This year it was different.
RICHARD TRULY: As we went through our student year, and got toward the fall, we realized that something funny was going on. And the thing that was funny going on was, they were actually conducting a secret, I guess you'd say crew selection.
JAMES BAMFORD: Without them knowing it, they were actually competing with each other for this program. They were being watched and being evaluated by these people to see who would make the best astronauts. The program was so secret, it was even kept from the potential astronauts themselves.
KAROL "BO" BOBKO (MOL Crew Member): We'd fly in the morning, we would have classes in the afternoon, and we'd study and reduce data at night.
RICHARD TRULY: They would teach you astronomy and flight mechanics, orbital mechanics—the relationship of bodies that are in orbit, either around the Earth, or going to the Moon—stuff like that.
NARRATOR: For the students, it was more than just books and flying. They were poked and prodded, spun in centrifuges, bounced in chairs and battered with psychological testing.
RICHARD TRULY: And lo and behold, they finally came out with a list, and I was on the list. I almost fell over, I had no idea.
MAC MACLEAY: And then I had to go through a screening with a couple of other guys, to see whether I would fit. The previous height limit had been 6 feet, and I was almost 6'2". I was determined, so I pulled that helmet down so tight I was almost dying, but I just barely made it. I think there were about 100 people that started out, and to survive down to eight or so made you feel pretty good.
RICHARD TRULY: This was 1964. Nineteen sixty-four, only Mercury had flown. The Gemini astronauts were down at NASA. And here we were, going to get to fly in space, even though it was a military program. So we were sitting on the top of the anthill.
JAMES BAMFORD: And they finally did tell the people that they selected, but they only told them a cover story. They didn't tell them the real story about what they were being selected for. What they told them was that they were just going to go up to space and do experiments.
NARRATOR: Unlike U-2s or spy satellites, launching man into space just couldn't be kept secret. So a decision was made to call it a laboratory and to try hiding the project by putting it in plain sight.
NEWSCAST ANNOUNCER: Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.
NARRATOR: President Lyndon Johnson announced the program and gave it a plausible cover story, something that Americans, if not the Russians, would possibly believe.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON (President of the United States, 1963-1969 Newsclip: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am today instructing the Department of Defense to immediately proceed with the development of a Manned Orbiting Laboratory. This program will bring us new knowledge about what man is able to do in space.
NARRATOR: The cover story was that the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL, would be a space station, crewed with two military astronauts for 30-day missions. During that time, they'd perform routine experiments on themselves and test their ability to do military tasks in space. There was no mention of an operational mission, nor any hint of espionage.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The cost of developing the Manned Orbiting Laboratory will be one billion, five hundred million dollars.
NARRATOR: It took three more months until the crew was finally told their real mission.
RICHARD TRULY: And that day really was an amazing day. We got briefed into the program as to what it was about.
NARRATOR: The MOL was actually an orbital spy station, equipped with a camera the size of a car. It would fly an orbit that would give maximum coverage to Russian targets. And the crew were no longer going to be astronauts, they were going to be astrospies.
JAMES BAMFORD: In essence, they were going to become the successors to Francis Gary Powers. Basically, they are going to be the people who are going to be flying over Russia now.
MAC MACLEAY: I think everybody was tickled. I mean, it was something that we really thought would contribute. We weren't going to go check how the African fruit fly worked under zero gravity, you know, we were going to do something worthwhile—okay—that we thought was worthwhile.
ALBERT "AL" CREWS (MOL Crew Member): Before, I was going to go play with something. I wasn't really impressed by that. But now, we were going to take pictures, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: The argument was that if we had a man up there, he would have more flexibility and judgment.
NARRATOR: The plan was to launch a two-man Gemini capsule atop a 56-foot-long laboratory module. In orbit, the crew would unlock a hatch, cut into the capsule's heat shield, and crawl through a narrow tunnel into the pressurized crew compartment.
Inside, as seen in this newly discovered government film, the astrospies could look through a view-port and observe and photograph high priority targets in Russia and elsewhere. When the 30-day mission was completed, the astrospies would return to Earth in the Gemini capsule, leaving the laboratory module to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
With their highly classified mission in hand, the astrospies disappeared into a hidden world.
MAC MACLEAY: The only people you could really communicate with about what you were actually doing were people within the program office.
DONALD H. PETERSON (MOL Crew Member): And when we traveled, we didn't identify ourselves as MOL or crew members or anything else. And I think, once in a great while, we traveled on I.D. that identified us as somebody else.
BO BOBKO: We didn't go around and tell everybody, knock on everybody's door and say, "Hey, I was an astronaut."
RICHARD TRULY: Although we did have a joke in the program that one day there was going to be a little article back on page 50 of the newspaper that said, "An Unidentified Spacecraft Launched from an Unidentified Launch Pad, with Unidentified Astronauts, to do an Unidentified Mission." That's the way it was.
NARRATOR: But despite the carefully crafted cover stories, despite all the safeguards, half a world away the Russians were carefully watching and listening. And they didn't believe a word.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO (Almaz Chief Designer): We had some information about the MOL program from open and closed channels. We had our sources.
ASIF SIDDIQI: These guys in Russia were smart. They could look at MOL they could see, sort of, the general systems layout and they could tell you that this was something much more serious than simply applied military experimentation.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: Russia was being surrounded by a network of American nuclear missile bases, and we needed information on the locations of these bases. Reconnaissance from outer space was absolutely necessary.
ANATOLI BLAGOV (Almaz Designer): We faced the problem of how potential targets could be identified and located. That's how the Almaz project was born.
NARRATOR: In Russian, Almaz means "a diamond in the rough." Almaz was the code name for the Soviet spy ship, a code name that could never be spoken. Almaz was a state secret, a spacecraft the Soviets hoped would dwarf the American MOL.
ANATOLI BLAGOV: It's not just a satellite or a spaceship, it's a whole complex, a whole system, that consisted of a number of elements. Its overall weight was about 20 tons.
ASIF SIDDIQI: We are talking about two massive, you know, 20-ton spaceships, in space, docked to each other, cosmonauts photographing the Earth, perhaps even doing some sort of battle simulations.
And it wasn't just going to be bigger, it was meant to be better. Unlike the MOL, Almaz was designed to stay in orbit for years at a time. Supply ships would ferry cosmonauts and equipment back and forth on a regular basis.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: The Soviet Union, at that time, was ahead in many ways. We launched the first satellite. We had the first spaceman, so we believed we were ahead of everybody.
ASIF SIDDIQI: Almaz and MOL were, in some sense, kind of the shadow space race. It was the one without the parades.
C. GORDON FULLERTON (MOL Crew Member): It's hard to remember the sense of conflict. The Russians were the enemy. They really were.
DONALD H. PETERSON: And the game became, "We need to beat the Russians into space."
BO BOBKO: During the heart of the Cold War, we thought of this big Russian bear as being all powerful and all knowing.
AL CREWS: I was always afraid that they were ahead of us quite a bit.
ASIF SIDDIQI: You can see the timelines of these two programs, and they were very much close.
NARRATOR: Hidden from view, an intensive training program began. MOL crew members began simulating life in zero gravity.
RICHARD TRULY: We did some of the work in zero-g airplanes, particularly learning how to crawl through that hatch in the Gemini B.
NARRATOR: One task the astrospies simulated over and over was one of the most basic: going back and forth through the hatch and narrow tunnel that connected the Gemini capsule to the laboratory module.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: One would go back into the Gemini through this really awkward tunnel.
HANK HARTSFIELD: As we progressed on the program, we got better at what we were doing.
NARRATOR: In an eerie parallel world, cosmonauts were practicing exactly the same maneuvers in Russian airplanes.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: Even though there was no exchange of information between the Americans and the Soviets, we were thinking in the same direction. We also had a special hatch linking the main unit of the orbital station to the return capsule.
NARRATOR: To simulate life onboard the Almaz, Russian designers built underwater tanks with a mockup of the spaceship. There, planners had more time to study complicated maneuvers, like loading film capsules into the station.
Half a world away the Americans had developed the same solution. Former test pilot Bud Evans was put in charge of designing the underwater training program.
N.C. "BUD" EVANS (Former Test Pilot): In the airplane, when you reached zero-g and you had maybe 40 seconds to maybe a minute-fifteen seconds at the most, so you really couldn't get a timeline on how long it would take somebody to do a task. And following that, we went full bore on simulating the MOL astronauts' task under water.
JAMES BAMFORD: They created an undersea training facility off Buck Island in the Caribbean. Under water, they dropped this very large mock-up of the MOL spacecraft.
NARRATOR: In film that has never been shown publicly before, you can see MOL crewmembers first putting on scuba gear; then donning their full spacesuits.
AL CREWS: It was very similar to what it would be in space. Cutting out some of the gravity, you can't move very well.
NARRATOR: With a more complete mock-up, the MOL crewmembers practiced more mission-critical tasks, like simulating how to move the packages of exposed film back through the narrow tunnel into the Gemini capsule.
BUD EVANS: We had to know how long these tasks were going to take. This was one way to get some real timeline studies.
NARRATOR: While both the astronauts and cosmonauts were training for reconnaissance, military planners saw orbiting spy stations as just a first step.
USAF TRAINING FILM: Any nation sufficiently advanced in space technology can convert a vehicle into a military spacecraft to deny the use of space to the free world.
NARRATOR: A 1963 Air Force briefing film titled Space and National Security depicted space as a battlefield and showed just how far the military thought that battlefield might extend.
ASIF SIDDIQI: In the '60s, this was a time of big thinking, on both sides. The Russians were really thinking grand. And we're talking multiple battle stations in Earth orbit, reconnaissance stations manned by dozens and dozens of cosmonauts.
JAMES BAMFORD: One of the more amazing documents that we got was this list of experiments that were going to be used on the MOL. Among those were things that be considered outrageous today: going up there and capturing or stealing a Russian satellite, going up there and maybe knocking a Russian satellite out of orbit or completely destroying a Russian satellite.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: Of course, we did realize that the Americans tried to develop the satellite interceptors and killer satellites. So we decided to develop a special cannon that was placed on the orbiting station. We just wanted to test and see how it worked in outer space. If somebody wanted to inspect or even attack the Almaz, we could destroy it.
NARRATOR: But first, engineers and designers from both sides had to contend with some fundamental laws of physics, so that astrospies could monitor enemy territory from 100 miles in space.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: It's a mystery to most people who haven't flown in orbit what it's like trying to look at the ground as it's going by when you are going 18,000 miles an hour.
DONALD H. PETERSON: Just looking out the window with normal, or the equivalent of 20-20 vision, you could see tankers, oil tankers, in the gulf of Oman, and they looked about that big. You couldn't see anything smaller than that without magnification.
NARRATOR: The magnification system developed for MOL was the state of the art in optical engineering. The camera system and optics—an advanced set of folded mirrors tucked into the station—were so far ahead of their time that a nearly identical configuration is still in use today.
JAMES BAMFORD: So if you picture a Hubbell space telescope, this huge, bus-sized telescope in space pointed at the stars, if you just turned it around and point it towards Earth, that would be the KH-11. We had very high resolution.
NARRATOR: For photo analysts it is all a question of resolution. The higher the resolution, the smaller the object you can see on the ground. Extraordinarily, the MOL's camera was designed to spot objects as small as three inches.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: The three-inch resolution was pretty critical to providing our people with the technical details of what the threat was and what the capability was.
ASIF SIDDIQI: The goal of people who do reconnaissance has always been to get the highest resolution.
DONALD H. PETERSON: But it's a tradeoff. The tighter you get the picture, the better the resolution you get, but the less coverage you get. What you really need is to be able to look at a big scene, and say, "Oh, there's something interesting I really need to look at over there."
NARRATOR: Inside a MOL training simulator, joysticks could zoom the lens both in and out and from side to side. A wide-angle viewfinder could spot targets at the very edge.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: We had optical eyepieces to look through with ways to point the line of sight, and they had photographs simulated to give you something to look at, test your ability to zero in on a point of interest quickly and accurately.
NARRATOR: The camera system was a huge engineering challenge. It required great precision while the target was in motion and the station was orbiting over the poles.
JAMES BAMFORD: They are trying to take a picture of something on Earth, as the Earth is going around on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour and they themselves are traveling around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. It was an extremely difficult scientific task to try to create a camera system that could take a very accurate picture knowing that everything is moving at a different relationship to each other.
NARRATOR: In both countries, engineers struggled to create rudimentary motion-tracking systems.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We had other devices for reconnaissance, but we needed to create a control system that could fix the camera on the targets to avoid blur.
ASIF SIDDIQI: On Almaz, they had a particular instrument which would basically freeze the image. They would actually have the camera move and compensate for the angular distance between a particular point. So as Almaz was flying over, the camera would, sort of, shift slowly to keep its sights on a particular territory.
NARRATOR: MOL's tracking and targeting system was computerized, but computing was still in its infancy.
MAC MACLEAY: By today's standards they were really crude. They were IBM 4-PIs. I don't think they had 50,000 words of storage in them. You could actually go to I.B.M.—I actually went there and watched, believe it or not—these ladies sitting there stringing these little magnetic cores on these wires to form the memory of this thing. You've got more in your cell phone, probably, than they had in those computers.
NARRATOR: But orbiting computers and tracking systems weren't what made the MOL extraordinary.
GENERAL ROBERT HERRES (Former Vice Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff): The difference between the MOL and an unmanned system is that here's a system with people in it. People are, you know, hands-on in the spacecraft, making decisions and adjusting it and so forth. That's different.
ASIF SIDDIQI: You have to ask yourself the question: I'm investing an enormous amount of resources to maintain a crew up in space; now, what they can provide is a real-time analysis of the targets; they can look at something, they can say, "Well, this is something interesting, and we should be able to, we should find out more about this." But is it worth that amount of resources to have a crew just tell you that?
DONALD H. PETERSON: The MOL program to put human beings in orbit was going to cost more money, because everything had to be man-rated. There had to be safety features. It's extra weight; it means the vehicle has to be bigger, has to have more fuel. It just adds cost everywhere along the line.
RICHARD TRULY: MOL was a very expensive program. It seems like chicken feed today. It was a, I think it was a $3 billion program. But in the 1960s, that was a lot of money.
MAC MACLEAY: Think back in the mid- to late '60s, Johnson was the president. He was trying to fund all the Great Society programs; he was trying to fund the expansion of the war in Vietnam; he was trying to fund going to the moon on Apollo. And here we were, and we would take a cut, basically, every year. And we used to jokingly tell ourselves that the only thing that remained constant on the program was the number of days 'til the first launch.
NARRATOR: The scheduled launch date for the first MOL mission was August, 1970. The Russians planned to launch Almaz that April to commemorate Lenin's 100th birthday. But in November, 1966, the Americans seemed poised to make a huge leap forward.
At Cape Canaveral, a unique rocket configuration was rolled out to the launch pad. Atop the standard Titan IIIC solid rocket boosters was a hollow mock-up of the MOL laboratory, and atop that, workers attached an unmanned Gemini-B capsule. Designers needed to test whether the Gemini's heat shield would still work after the MOL's access hatch had been cut into it. Unlike most NASA launches, there were no astronauts on display.
RICHARD TRULY: You know, the NASA astronauts back in the '60s were all good friends of ours. We knew them all. We went to Houston, and when we went to Houston, they'd tell us all about what they were doing, and we wouldn't tell them anything about what we were doing.
MAC MACLEAY: We were different, that's all. You know, we weren't on the cover of Life magazine, we weren't driving Corvettes, we were, you know, just doing different things.
NARRATOR: At 8:50 on November 3rd, the MOL program literally got off the ground. Just over 100 miles in space, the unmanned capsule was ejected.
U.S. Navy ships recovered it 5,500 miles out in the Atlantic. The capsule was intact and proved that pilots could survive re-entry.
But surviving their training program was another question. Major Robert Lawrence was one of the final crew members chosen for MOL. He was one of the Air Force's best pilots; he had a Ph.D. in chemistry; and he was the first African-American selected to be an astronaut.
BARBARA H. LAWRENCE: Bob was such an excellent pilot that the idea of him having an accident really had never entered my mind.
DONALD H. PETERSON: They were doing a simulated shuttle approach in an F-104, which was a very difficult maneuver, and I think Harve Royer was flying the airplane. And he just misjudged a second or two, and that's, that's all you had.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: And I think they got too low, pulled out too late, actually hit the ground hard, bounced in the air and, as I understand, the airplane rolled.
DONALD H. PETERSON: And Hoyer managed to...they both ejected. Hoyer survived the ejection and Bob didn't.
BARBARA H. LAWRENCE: I was standing at home changing buttons on a dress, and I looked out the window and saw Bob Herres coming up the walk. I thought, "I don't have to ask."
That's what they call a life-changing experience you know. Suddenly, you know, in the morning everything seems okay, and then a few minutes later it's all over.
ROBERT HERRES: That morning, Bob wanted to change his flight, and wanted me to fly in his place on that particular flight. That's about all there is to say. I should have been in the back seat of that airplane instead of him.
JAMES ABRAHMSON: The accident served to make us realize that we really were a very small group. And we had a big problem. And that meant lots of training and that we expanded our efforts and increased our efforts.
NARRATOR: By the beginning of 1969, the secret race between Russia and the U.S to launch the first spies into space seemed to be neck and neck. Both sides had made significant advances, but they were both years behind schedule.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We thought that in the coming year or two, we would be able to launch the space station into orbit. Still our program fell behind by three years.
HANK HARTSFIELD: For the first time, I know I, personally, was beginning to believe. I believed this can work.
JAMES BAMFORD: While some of them might have been a bit worried about what the Russians were doing at this point, what they really didn't know was that the competition was less with the Russians than it was within their own government.
Right around the corner from them was another agency called the N.R.O., the National Reconnaissance Office. The National Reconnaissance Office was extremely secret during the 1960s. ...matter of fact, even its name wasn't de-classified until the early '90s. Their job was to try to find a way to put satellites up there that could get the very same resolution.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: They were going to develop a competitive system, and the C.I.A. backed that.
NARRATOR: Larry Skantze, who had worked at N.R.O. and later helped plan MOL, was one of the few people with a security clearance for both programs.
LAWRENCE SKANTZE: Both systems were aimed at developing three-inch technical resolution. From a technical point of view, they kind of wound up in a dead heat.
C. GORDON FULLERTON: We were aware that there were unmanned reconnaissance satellites with truly impressive capability on the drawing board.
MAC MACLEAY: You know, there's the unmanned guys that said, you know, "We don't need you." And then, there's the manned guys that say, "Well, you can't live without us."
AL CREWS: Because it was obvious to me, the first time I went to a place where the unmanned system was being run; they didn't want any part of us. And somebody bigger than them told them to let us in to see it.
NARRATOR: Unknown to the MOL crew, the Secretary of the Air Force went to the White House to make a last minute plea to President Nixon, and the MOL's future hung in the balance.
For Hank Hartsfield, the morning of Tuesday, June 10th, 1969, was like any other.
HANK HARTSFIELD: I jumped in my little MG, and as usual, I had the little plug in my ear to listen to the local news, and was happily driving down 405, and they came in with an announcement.
DAVID PACKARD (Under Secretary of Defense/Audio Clip, 1969): This morning the Manned Orbiting Laboratory has been cancelled by the Department of Defense.
HANK HARTSFIELD: Holy cow! What's going on here? There was two news stations. I switched to the other one to see if the story would be any different, and it wasn't.
RICHARD TRULY: I was in a meeting, arguing with an engineer, and I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I looked around, and it was Mac. And I looked in his eyes, and he said real low, nobody else in the room heard him, he said, "The program is cancelled."
And I turned around to this engineer that I was arguing with, and I...my mind was blank. I didn't know what we'd been talking about.
REPORTER (Audio Clip, 1969): What happens to the 14 astronauts, now, who have been training for lengthy missions?
DAVID PACKARD (Under Secretary of Defense/Audio Clip, 1969): Well, they'll find, I'm sure, appropriate assignments elsewhere. They're a very good bunch of boys, and I'm sure they'll have many opportunities to use this experiment in the furtherment of their careers.
REPORTER (Audio Clip, 1969): Thank you.
NARRATOR: The end of the MOL program turned out to be as low-key as its beginning. Six weeks later the world focused on man's role in space, but they were watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.
NASA CONTROL: Oh, that looks beautiful from here, Neil.
NEIL ARMSTRONG ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE 1969: It has a stark beauty all its own.
JAMES ABRAHMSON: The world was unified at that point, and I think everybody was happy that a human being had landed on another planet. By the same token, I would say that I still cry at night, a little bit, about not getting to go.
ASIF SIDDIQI: The Americans had just landed on the moon in 1969, which was probably the greatest event in the history of space exploration, so far. The Russians had completely been upstaged; they had lost the moon race. So Dimitri Ustinov, who is basically the effective head of the Soviet space program, demands something to respond to this.
NARRATOR: This is what the Russians came up with. This is the spy station called Almaz. Thirteen years in the making, the sole remaining capsule is locked away in a warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow. It is a closed facility, a place foreigners are still denied access. NOVA's cameras were allowed inside, but only with a Russian camera crew.
The Almaz capsule was divided in three sections. One section was the crew quarters: a rudimentary bed, a table where cosmonauts could sit and prepare food, a tank to sip water from.
Another section was mainly taken up with the sensors, largest among them the Agat camera, weighing more than two tons, with six-meter mirrors folded inside; and in the middle, the operations module, where astrospies could zoom down to almost any point on Earth; to show them where they were, a simple globe that depicted their point in orbit; a screen they could look at that showed them a 100-kilometer panorama of the world below; in front of that screen, a viewfinder that could zoom in to 100 meters.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We could see details that were half a meter long from 250 kilometers in outer space. For example, we could see the make of the car, if it's a Ford or Toyota.
NARRATOR: The entire station was gyroscopically controlled, designed to pivot as it passed over its target so that when the shutter was triggered, the pictures wouldn't be blurred. And on the outside of the station, a first for manned space flight: a weapon. A 23-millimeter cannon that could fire on an enemy satellite that might be flying too close for comfort.
In June, 1974, all of this was loaded on top of a giant proton rocket and rolled out to the Baikanour launch site. The Almaz capsule was covered with a shroud so American reconnaissance satellites couldn't photograph it.
Nine days later, Colonel Pavel Popovich and his flight engineer Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Artukhin were launched into space to dock with the Almaz station. They were the first astrospies to orbit the Earth. Their mission lasted 15 days.
Valeri Romanov is a cosmonaut who trained on the Almaz program in the 1970s. Inside the command center, he demonstrates how Popovitch's mission worked.
VALERY ROMANOV (Almaz Cosmonaut): These are the synchronization levers. By pushing the button, we could switch on the camera. But the process itself went like this: here is the panoramic screen where I can see the ground beneath the station, and this is how I zoom in.
So, for example, I'm flying over the ocean and I spot a warship. I can see it's going a little bit to the right, so I can rotate the station a little to keep watching it and then film it. One, two, three, and I have a picture.
We had a special system to develop the film. You turned off all the station's lights and, in complete darkness, you put the film in the developer then moved out a projection table to fix the exposed film. Then you could select the most interesting parts and transmit it back to Earth with a video camera. So about an hour after you took a picture, people on Earth could be studying it.
Now let me show you the periscope and how it could protect you from attack. If you look through here, you can see outside the station and what's happening around it. Ground control can tell me something is going on, if something is approaching here, and that might be a killer satellite. We have the Nudelmann cannon right below the station's belly. So I try to rotate the station to face the object head-on and then feed in the command to fire. Fortunately that never happened.
VLADIMIR POLYACHENKO: We were afraid about what would happen to the station if we fired the cannon, so we never tested it with the men onboard. But after the crew left, we fired the cannon by remote control, and the station survived the intense vibration.
NARRATOR: Subsequent missions to the Almaz seemed star-crossed. On two missions, cosmonauts failed to dock with the spy station and returned to Earth empty-handed.
On the third attempt to reach Almaz, things got worse. The cosmonauts docked successfully and entered the Almaz, but on their 42nd day in orbit, as they passed over the dark side of Earth, the station's electrical systems suddenly shut down. Alarms sounded, and the station was plunged into darkness. Out of radio contact and drifting in space, the cosmonauts struggled for two hours to bring the craft back to life. When power was restored, the frailty of man in space became clear. The flight engineer suffered a breakdown and began experiencing audio hallucinations. No medicine on board could help. Six days later, the cosmonauts were ordered back to Earth.
In February, 1977, Victor Gorbatko, a Soviet air force colonel, was the last pilot to command Almaz. His mission was almost flawless.
VICTOR GORBATKO (ALMAZ Commander): When we flew over the United States, I looked down and immediately recognized New York.
We could see human beings on the streets. I would say we could see objects about one meter in size. I had enough time to count planes on the ground when we flew over military bases. We just had to shoot film of any weapons we could spot. That was about all we had to do.
NARRATOR: Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, he said, the Almaz orbit was useful not only for spying on the U.S., but also on its allies.
VICTOR GORBATKO: Our main assignment with the Agat system was to film ships and planes on the other side. There was some military tension in Israel, so we had to count how many planes they had.
NARRATOR: To Colonel Gorbatko, there was a big difference between space espionage and space wars.
VICTOR GORBATKO: My mission has a peaceful character. We didn't shoot. We just took pictures. So we were space spies. That would be a good title for your movie.
NARRATOR: But far below, in Moscow, senior Kremlin officials were asking the same question their American counterparts asked eight years before. "Was this really worth the effort and the risk?"
JAMES BAMFORD: One of the biggest ironies here was that the Russians probably felt that they won. But in the end, it was a hollow victory, because they ended up, basically, coming to the same conclusion. It just took them about a decade longer.
NARRATOR: On February 25, 1977, at 9:21 a.m., Moscow time, Colonel Gorbatko undocked from Almaz and descended toward central Kazakhstan. He and his partner would be the last astrospies.
After 13 years of extraordinary effort by scientists from both sides, with billions of rubles and billions of dollars spent, only five missions had been launched, all by the Russians. And just two of those were deemed a success. For all the effort, astrospies had managed just 81 days in orbit.
JAMES BAMFORD: In the end, it came down to a competition of man against machine, and machine won.
VICTOR GORBATKO: Still, I absolutely think it was a premature decision to close down the program. They insist the space station without the pilots are more efficient. I would insist that is wrong.
MAC MACLEAY: I thought it was a good program. I think we could have done something really worthwhile. It was aborted prematurely, as far as we were concerned.
HANK HARTSFIELD: I think it was positive. I think...I'd like to think—and I believe I'm correct—that we had a positive influence on the way things would be going in the future.
NARRATOR: Two months before the last Russian cosmonaut left the Almaz, America's National Reconnaissance Office successfully launched its first KH-11 unmanned spy satellite. Said to be capable of capturing images with 3-inch resolution, but using video sensors instead of film, this was the digital age of espionage. This was what had rendered America's astrospies obsolete before they ever flew.
30 years later, dozens of unmanned satellites silently monitor the world below. They are also the astrospies' legacy.
HANK HARTSFIELD: When I look back at what we did on MOL, we didn't, far as I know, develop something that has led to another manned system. I think that the work we did helped provide data for future systems.
ANATOLI BLAGOV: Just yesterday, I went to the Google search engine and I could actually see my own house. Thirty years ago, who would have thought I would be able to see something like that?
NARRATOR: On NOVA's Astrospies Web site, hear from the astronauts of the MOL program, see spy photos that made history, and more. Find it on PBS.org.
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PBS: Battle of the X-Planes
PBS: Battle of the X-Planes
RADIO: Three, two, one, down.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE (Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics): We're here today to announce the largest acquisition program in the history of the Department of Defense.
RADIO: Roger, copy that.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE: The Joint Strike Fighter.
CONTROL: Just for the record, pilot, yeah? You are my hero.
NARRATOR: In the skies over the Mojave Desert a battle of X-planes has begun.
CREW MEMBER: That looks good.
NARRATOR: Over the next year, two different planes will take to the skies again and again on a relentless quest to be crowned the fighter of the future, perhaps the last manned fighter the U.S. will ever build.
FRED KNOX (Chief Test Pilot, The Boeing Company): It smoothes out beautifully.
TOM MORGENFELD (Chief Test Pilot, Lockheed Martin): Woohoo! This is fun.
RICK REZABEK (Chief Engineer, Lockheed Martin): God, it looked so awesome.
TOM MORGENFELD: It felt great.
RICK REZABEK: We're going to fly the shit out of this airplane and just kick ass every day. That's what it's all about.
NARRATOR: It's all part of a top-secret competition, locking two of America's aerospace giants in a furious engineering dogfight to the death.
GRAHAM WARWICK (Writer, Flight International): You couldn't have a more interesting competition—two very different companies, two very different designs, conservative heavyweight against a radical newcomer.
DENNIS MUILENBURG (Engineer, The Boeing Company): We've got a hell of a smart team, so lets go figure out how to make it work.
RICK REZABEK: There's never any real time to relax.
SCOTT WINSHIP: Would I like to be farther ahead? Yes. Would I like to be further done? Yes.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE : I think we truly believe we've got the right vehicle for the customer.
WALT CANNON (Flight Test Engineer, The Boeing Company): It's starting to look like an airplane, that's what really neat about it.
ANDY BALOUGH (Boeing): I see our future contract.
WALT CANNON: Well, that, too.
NARRATOR: Not just any contract, but the most lucrative contract in military history, at least 200 billion dollars.
FRED KNOX: And we're flying.
NARRATOR: And the winner won't be just any fighter. It will need to land on a carrier, evade enemy radar, hover like a helicopter. But trying to build a fighter that can do all three, it's a tremendous challenge. It's not a natural thing for a jet airplane to do.
SCOTT WINSHIP (Engineer, Lockheed Martin): Come on, Simon.
NARRATOR: Experimental new designs come with their share of risks and failures. But now the U.S. military desperately wants a winner, claiming that aging fighters and shrinking budgets threaten to undermine its command of the skies.
Will a one-size-fits-all fighter, a Joint Strike Fighter, work for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines? Will it rescue them from the death spiral of defense costs?
With unprecedented access from the Department of Defense, NOVA's cameras take you into the U.S. military's most classified facilities from the beginning through repeated trial and error.
GERRY CLAUSIER: Talk to me. Do you want me to reset or slow?
ENGINEER: We're recommending we abort.
MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL HOUGH (Joint Strike Fighter Program Director, 1999-2001): The original design wasn't going to hack it.
MARK MAGNUSSEN: How much effort is ahead of us to make it work?
NARRATOR: Watch two teams struggle to get their daring ideas off the drawing board and into the air.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE: The Joint Strike Fighter will be the world's premiere strike platform. With the decision to proceed now made, it is now appropriate to announce the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter competition.
NARRATOR: In the end, only one winner takes all—in The Battle of the X-Planes, up next on NOVA.
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NARRATOR: Inside this bag is the future of American fighter power.
MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL HOUGH: There will probably never, ever be another program as complex as this, or as big as this when you start talking about dollars.
NARRATOR: It's called the Joint Strike Fighter Program. For five years the JSF has held a competition between two titans of aerospace to see who will build the next generation fighter. It's a prize worth up to 200 billion dollars, and the winner's name is in the bag.
JAY MILLER (Aviation Writer/Historian): The winner of the JSF competition is going to dominate the fighter aircraft market, not only here in the United States, but worldwide.
NARRATOR: Fasten your seatbelt and put up your tray table. NOVA and the Department of Defense have cleared you to enter places where cameras have never gone before, from secret installations to the cockpits of the latest experimental fighters. You've landed in the classified world of the X-planes—both hi-tech and handcrafted—where pilots fly into the unknown with just you by their side.
This is the battle to build the fighter of the 21st century. In the first strike in the war on terror, fighters are the front-line warriors. Navy fighters join squadrons from the Air Force and the Marines to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda positions in Afghanistan.
These aircraft play a key role in routing the enemy just as they did in the Gulf War in the early 1990s. In fact, some of the fighters are literally the same planes built in the '80s, designed in the '70s to fulfill Cold War objectives from the '60s. The most important weapon in America's arsenal is based on ideas almost a half-century old.
MICHAEL HOUGH: Our airplanes, they're wearing out. They're tired. Thirty year airplane's still a great airplane, serves its purposes well, but it's, it's old.
GRAHAM WARWICK: These aircraft, in the future battlefield they're going to be a bit like dinosaurs, not just in their sort of physical age, but their electronic capability. They may not be survivable.
REAR ADMIRAL CRAIG STEIDLE (Joint Strike Fighter Program Director, 1995-1997): We now have to go to higher altitude instead of lower altitude. We need to make ourselves as small as possible from a radar perspective. We have to do the same job, but the world has changed.
NARRATOR: Almost all of America's fighters will one day wind up here at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Old generals may fade away, but old fighters are cannibalized for parts.
The Air Force still relies on thousands of these, the venerable F-16, but the F-16 is past its prime. In the age of stealth, this fighter shows up on radar the size of a small flying house.
This is an F-18, the mainstay of the Navy, but Navy planes get old fast. The controlled crash known as a carrier landing and the rapid acceleration of a catapult launch will eventually create irreparable stress fractures and send them all here.
This is the subsonic AV-8 Harrier Jump Jet, flown by the Marines. While it remains the only successful vertical landing fighter, it dates back to the British invasion of America by the Beatles. Though later refined by McDonnell Douglas, by any measure the Harrier is ready for retirement.
The goal of the Joint Strike Fighter program is to replace all of these, the F-16, the F-18 and even the vertically landing Harrier.
MICHAEL HOUGH: It is an absolute vital necessity to have, not only a replacement airplane for the older airplanes, but to have an airplane that is a 21st century airplane to meet the needs for tomorrow.
NARRATOR: The plane for the 21st century, at least for the Air Force, would appear to be already here: the new F-22 Raptor, scheduled for deployment in 2005. The Raptor is the ultimate fighter, so stealthy its radar signature isn't much bigger than a bird. And it can fly at supersonic speeds longer than any other fighter, and that means it can strike deeply and invisibly at an opponent.
But the Raptor has a huge vulnerability that the JSF program must overcome: a giant price tag. Each plane costs about 100 million dollars.
BILL SWEETMAN (Aerospace Writer): The F-22 is a spectacular airplane. The problem is it's expensive. And that means the Air Force will never really have enough of them to attack the many and varied small and large targets that make up the modern battlefield.
NARRATOR: The F-22 is just the latest example of a trend that goes back decades. Each new generation of fighters costs more than the last, so fewer are purchased—ever more expensive fighters in ever decreasing numbers. In defense circles, that's known as the death spiral.
CURTIS PEEBLES (Aviation Writer/Historian): Where the death spiral could lead is the prediction that in the year 2054, the U.S. defense budget will only buy one airplane. So the Air Force uses the airplane in the morning, the Navy uses it in the evening, and the Marines, unfortunately, only get to use it every leap year on the extra day.
NARRATOR: So that is the JSF's mission impossible—to break the death spiral by coming up with a new fighter that costs a third of an F-22, replaces all of these, and meets the needs of the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines.
MICHAEL HOUGH: They absolutely said, "You'll never pull this off—impossible."
NARRATOR: In the past, the fiercely independent services would have fought for their own weapons programs. In the sixties, when the cost-cutting Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, forced the Navy and Air Force to use the same plane, the F-111, the joint program was a resounding flop. But these days, with smaller post-Cold-War budgets, the spreadsheet is mightier than the sword.
MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE MUELLNER (Joint Strike Force Program Director, 1993-1995): The Joint Strike Fighter program was a huge leap of faith for the services. The enabler, though, was they didn't have any choice. They knew that they had to modernize their fighter force structure, and the funds were not available to do that.
NARRATOR: With no other options, the effort to design the Joint Strike Fighter begins and almost immediately there's disagreement. The services can't even agree on the number of engines. The Navy's F-18 Hornet has two engines for safety. If one goes out, you don't have to ditch. But two engines are a deal-killer for the Marines because of their weight.
CRAIG STEIDLE: We cannot build, today, a two-engine, vertical short takeoff landing airplane. So the Navy wanted two engines, the Marine Corp had to have a single engine, and the Air Force wanted a single engine, because it was much more affordable and they don't have...they're not out over the ocean at night all by themselves like we are.
NARRATOR: The decision hinges on how dependable one engine can be.
RADIO VOICE: Steady state 255 started.
NARRATOR: After talking with jet manufacturers, the JSF team ramps up the specs for engine reliability. Rear Admiral Steidle convinces a reluctant Navy to go with just one.
CRAIG STEIDLE: That was another piece that was necessary to pull the program together, because without that we could not have a common production line.
GRAHAM WARWICK: I think the effort that's gone on here to create a joint requirement is astounding. And it's really...it's what's allowed the program to get where it is. And it will be what allows the program to continue, because if the services keep saying, "We all agree what we want, and we want this aircraft," then it will happen.
NARRATOR: Even with everyone on board, there's rough air ahead.
BILL SWEETMAN: We know how to build a stealth fighter. We know how to build a long-range agile fighter. We may even have a good way of building a fighter that can land and take off vertically. But trying to build a fighter that can do all three is very, very difficult.
NARRATOR: The Pentagon spent over three billion dollars in research to see if it was possible, and the answer? Sort of.
PAUL KAMINSKI (Department of Defense): The airplanes are not the same aircraft, but the building blocks are the same building blocks, for the most part: same engine, same major avionics. In fact, it's not important to have every piece...part...the same, but the expensive parts or modules...Through the life cycle of the aircraft there was the potential to save 60 billion dollars. And that's a lot of money in anybody's calculus, even in the Department of Defense.
NARRATOR: With the services in agreement about the requirements, the Joint Strike Fighter program launches a competition for innovative designs for the new affordable family of fighters. Like a high-stakes game show, only two contractors can make it to the final round and build test planes.
With billions on the line, U.S. defense contractors hold their breath as the Pentagon announces the two finalists for "Who Wants to Build the Next Generation Fighter?"
PERRY: These contractors are Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
NARRATOR: The announcement sends shockwaves through the aerospace industry, dealing a deathblow to one of the most respected names in aviation. McDonnell Douglas, a company with a fighter legacy that seemed to guarantee a spot in the final round, doesn't make the cut. The impact for the company and its employees is devastating. Within two years, McDonnell Douglas is sold to Boeing, one of the JSF winners.
A world leader in commercial jets, the Seattle-based company is seen as an unlikely contender in a fighter battle, for good reason. Boeing's last fighter was built in the 1930s—the P-26 Peashooter, a fighter from the age before jets, before even a closed cockpit.
PHIL CONDIT (Chief Executive Officer, The Boeing Company): Boeing hadn't built a fighter in a long time, and I think early on Boeing was considered, literally, a dark horse in this competition.
NARRATOR: But the Boeing acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the Navy's F-18 and the Marine's Harrier, makes a dark horse an even bet.
BILL SWEETMAN: By acquiring McDonnell Douglas, Boeing suddenly moves from becoming the least experienced JSF team to possibly the most experienced.
PHIL CONDIT: ...clearly leveled the playing field.
FRANK STATKUS (Program Manager, The Boeing Company): I'm in this job to win, and going back to...
NARRATOR: Boeing's JSF effort is lead by Frank Statkus, an engineer and thirty-year company man. When you shoulder the weight of a potential 200 billion-dollar contract, stress comes with the job.
FRANK STATKUS: A year ago I had hair, and it was dark. And now I have less of it, and it's a race to see what goes gray versus goes away.
NARRATOR: While Statkus runs the project, he isn't the creator of Boeing's design. These days with the complexity of fighters, no single person can claim that role.
JAY MILLER: State-of-the-art fighters, they're all designed now by computers, and it's, and it's...these are big teams of engineers who sit down, you know, and do these CAD/CAM drawings. It is very tough to find, you know, one person who can sit there and tell you that, "I designed that airplane."
NARRATOR: At the heart of the Boeing design for the JSF is a large delta, or triangular wing.
BILL SWEETMAN: It's an unusual approach, but the big advantages of that are that it's structurally simple and that it contains an enormous amount of fuel.
NARRATOR: Though there hasn't been an American fighter built with a delta wing since the '60s, the design has its advantages. The fastest jet ever to fly, the SR-71 Blackbird has a delta wing because it decreases drag at supersonic speeds. The Space shuttle is also built around one because it provides great lift.
But neither the Shuttle nor the SR-71 are exactly agile. A delta design pays a price in speed when executing turns, and the control surfaces near the tail don't have the leverage to turn the plane sharply.
European designers have overcome these handicaps in their new fighter, the Typhoon, by adding canards near the front of the plane. But in the U.S., delta fighters have been out of favor for decades, until the JSF picked the Boeing design as a finalist.
Why the new interest? Deltas can be cheap to build.
BILL SWEETMAN: Boeing took a step back and said "What makes airplanes expensive? How can we leave it out?" And they got a very, very simple design.
FRANK STATKUS: Boeing's expertise in wings has kind of taken a different tack. Our engineers have chosen to build this wing as one piece from tip to tip. We have always studied the idea of building a one-piece wing and attaching the fuselage to the wing. And so this time we had an opportunity to really try it.
NARRATOR: Boeing has taken to heart the JSF concept, meeting the needs of the Air Force, Navy and Marines through a versatile common design. And it even accommodates the biggest JSF challenge, landing like a Harrier.
While it gets a bad rap for safety, the Harrier is no doubt the most adaptable fighter ever built. Matching its capabilities will drive many of the design decisions of the competition.
When fully loaded with fuel and bombs, a Harrier takes off in as little as 500 feet, a third of that needed by most fighters. That short takeoff distance makes many roads into potential runways. After an attack, it returns, a lighter fighter ready to execute its trademark Buck Rogers move.
A Harrier hovers using rotating nozzles that direct engine exhaust downward. This mode of flight, called direct lift, demands an enormous amount of power, and it's dangerous. Before computer control, balancing a Harrier on its own engine thrust was like trying to sit on a geyser. Even today, its accident rate is four times that of a Navy Hornet.
But through their flexibility, Harriers have proven their value. In fact, in the Gulf War, Harriers flew more missions than any other kind of fighter. For the British, the Harrier remains essential. British aircraft carriers are smaller than their American counterparts. The Harrier's short takeoff ability overcomes the problem and creates a portable fighter force.
GRAHAM WARWICK: The Harrier has allowed the U.K., basically, to be where it couldn't be. The Falklands is a classic example. I mean, without the Harrier, we could not have defended the Falklands. We couldn't have got anybody...any aircraft down there. But the ability to put a reasonably competent combat aircraft onto a deck and get it down there, and then fight, was just the difference between success and failure.
NARRATOR: But the Harrier can't fly supersonic, a serious limitation in a modern fighter.
SIMON HARGREAVES (B.A.E. Test Pilot, Lockheed Martin): In terms of its turn performance, its range and endurance, and its maximum speed, whichever metric you want to look at, it fairs unfavorably with any modern airplane.
NARRATOR: The British search for a replacement Harrier brings them to the JSF table. They've become full partners. It's the first time a foreign government has been included in an American fighter development program.
The addition of the British only heightens what many consider the central technical challenge of the JSF competition, landing the fighter vertically. Alternatives to the Harrier's direct lift system have been studied by both contractors, but Boeing has come to a surprising conclusion.
FRANK STATKUS: Over the years, all contractors have looked at all of these various lift methods, and the least impact to the design always has been direct lift.
GRAHAM WARWICK: The Boeing lift system is basically the modern version of the Harrier, taking the engine thrust and putting it through a pair of nozzles that direct it downwards. The advantage that Boeing has is that you basically strap on the lift module around the engine. So the changes are pretty minimal.
NARRATOR: The fewer the changes between the Marine fighter and the other versions, the better the bottom line. Boeing has made an ally of affordability.
FRANK STATKUS: So, I believe when we're all finished doing a flight test, we'll have proven that direct lift offers the absolute greatest affordability because of the greatest commonality.
NARRATOR: While direct lift is affordable, other parts of the plane must pay a price. For balance during hover, the engine must be in the middle, and that leads to a gaping inlet to feed it air. To some, Boeing has designed a plane only its mother could love.
BILL SWEETMAN: It's a strange looking airplane. It's short. It's squat. The engine's in the front, not the back. It has this huge air inlet in front that reminds me of a hippopotamus.
GRAHAM WARWICK: This is a fighter competition not a beauty pageant, but there is an adage in aerospace that if it looks right, it flies right, and appearance may be a deciding factor.
NARRATOR: Appearance aside, Boeing's proposal is a cunning entry for the JSF competition. Throwing over fighter tradition, the company delivers a radical but simple design that promises to be cheap to build. Boeing's ready to give its aerospace opponent a flight to the finish.
DENNIS MUILENBURG (Engineer, The Boeing Company): When I daydream, I see it hovering; I see it taking off from airfields; I see it operating around a ship. And sometimes I even see it shooting down the Lockheed airplane.
NARRATOR: "Only in your dreams," is the likely response of Lockheed Martin, America's largest defense contractor. For decades, in this secret facility in California, the legendary Skunk Works, Lockheed has designed and built aircraft that have blown through the boundaries of imagination.
BILL SWEETMAN: The Lockheed's Skunk Works' reputation is founded on its ability to put together a small team of very motivated people, get everybody else out of the way, and leave them to solve a problem that everybody else thinks can't be solved.
RICK REZABEK: The whole history of this place has been, "There is nothing that we can't do, there is no project that we can't accomplish." There's a huge amount of pride, of, "We can do anything."
NARRATOR: By the time Lockheed earns its place in the final JSF competition, Chief Engineer Rick Rezabek and his team have already spent five years designing their fighter. Now they must build a pair of test planes in just two. If Lockheed wins, their work will live on for decades. If it loses...
RICK REZABEK: The stakes are horrendous on this. This program will end up running from today out through the year 2050, long after my retirement. The performance of this team and the decision making that goes on during these next two years are very key.
NARRATOR: The mystique of the Skunk Works remains unrivalled in aviation. It's the birthplace of America's first operational jet fighter, the P-80. In the '50s and '60s, this covert design house created the ultimate spy planes for the CIA: the high flying U-2 and the high velocity SR-71 Blackbird.
Later, for the Air Force, it built the F-117 Nighthawk, the first stealth fighter. Unveiled to the public during the Gulf War, the Nighthawk was the only U.S. aircraft to strike targets in downtown Baghdad. The image of anti-aircraft guns aimlessly blazing away at invisible attackers is a surreal salute to its success and that of the Skunk Works.
BILL SWEETMAN: They conducted many of their most advance programs in complete secrecy, such that nobody else in the world even had a clue what they were up to.
It's got to be very, very scary going up against those guys.
NARRATOR: The F-117 sacrifices speed and handling for stealth. It's been superseded by the current gold standard of American fighters, the F-22 Raptor, built by Lockheed. While very expensive and not the all-in-one fighter for the JSF, the Raptor provides a wealth of proven design ideas, including a radical new shape for stealth.
It's no surprise the Lockheed design for the JSF inherits the Raptor's contours. Built around one common airframe, Lockheed's proposed fighter is modified for each service. Most visibly the Navy model has a larger wing and tail for carrier landings.
The exterior design of Lockheed's fighter holds few surprises. On the surface, it looks like the company doesn't want to gamble. It's on the inside, for the Marines vertical-landing requirement, that Lockheed's bet the farm. The company's gone with a daring new propulsion system known as a lift fan.
RICK REZABEK: The lift fan has been an engineering challenge, because there has not been a lift fan built before.
NARRATOR: In the lift fan design, the engine sits in the usual fighter position in the tail. A drive shaft connects it to a large fan placed behind the pilot. To hover, engine exhaust is directed downward, but the fan is also engaged, taking in air from above the plane and blowing it out below. That creates two balanced sources of thrust, potentially a more powerful and stable arrangement than the Boeing solution. But to accomplish this feat, the drive shaft must be spun at an incredible rate.
RICK REZABEK: Think of taking the propulsion system in a Navy Destroyer, shrinking that down into a smaller package, putting it into a jet fighter airplane.
NARRATOR: It's a technological challenge in the tradition of the Skunk Works. If successful, the lift fan will be revolutionary, but on the drawing boards, it doesn't blow away its critics.
GRAHAM WARWICK: It's a very clever solution, but it's got gears and bearings and a lot of moving parts. And in an operational airplane, you've got to make sure they work 100 percent of the time. If you're a pilot hovering at 50 feet and one of those parts fails, it's going to spoil your day.
NARRATOR: Despite its complexity, the lift fan offers another benefit, invisible to the JSF's sensors and test equipment but plain to the naked eye: aesthetics.
RICK REZABEK: You can look at the Lockheed Martin airplane and say, that looks like what I would expect a modern, high performance, high capable jet fighter to look like. You look at the Boeing airplane and the general reaction is, "I don't get it."
NARRATOR: Lockheed will build its test planes the same way it's built its successful prototypes of the past, as hand-crafted machines, here in the Skunk Works.
This facility provides a well-worn path to winning the JSF competition. Lockheed will try to triumph through daring new technology, while Boeing tries to win with a bold cost-saving design combined with manufacturing know-how second to none.
GRAHAM WARWICK: You couldn't have a more interesting competition—two very different companies, two very different designs, a conservative heavyweight against a radical newcomer. If Lockheed wins, it continues its decades of fighter manufacturing. If Boeing wins, it could go on to dominate the fighter market like it dominates the airliner market.
SAM WILSON (Joint Strike Fighter Engineer, NASA): I think we will look back at this time, at this competition between Boeing and Lockheed, and I think it will be remembered as the great fighter war.
NARRATOR: The next battle of the fighter war will feature close combat. Less than a mile away from the Skunk Works is Boeing's top-secret complex, the Phantom Works.
In these two classified installations, the JSF competition is ready for takeoff. The schedule will be fierce by aerospace standards: in 24 months and on a budget of a billion dollars, each company must build and fly not one, but two experimental planes.
Adding to the tension, Boeing and Lockheed will remain in the dark about each other's progress. NOVA is among the select few cleared to enter both facilities, its footage locked away each night by security personnel.
Boeing may not have built a fighter since the 1930s, but from day one the company rolls out innovations to simplify the job. This scaffolding holds the parts as they arrive. The team uses lasers to position each component precisely in three-dimensional space without having to wait for surrounding pieces.
The parts themselves are designed so precisely that they fit together like puzzle pieces with hardly any adjustment. Techniques like this lead Boeing to claim it can reduce assembly costs by as much as 75 percent.
BILL SWEETMAN: It's a very interesting process, very new. Boeing's ability to demonstrate how the airplane is put together is certainly a plus, and that will weigh in their favor.
NARRATOR: The frame for the single massive delta wing, the heart of the Boeing design, is already in the works. But the skin that will cover it is being cooked up over a thousand miles away at Boeing's headquarters in Seattle.
Engineer George Bible has spent the last year experimenting with a revolutionary material for the surface of the wings. It's a resin and carbon fiber mix called "thermoplastic." In small quantities, it's been used on fighters before, but no one has ever tried to create anything as large as a 30-foot wing skin.
GEORGE BIBLE (Manufacturing Engineer, The Boeing Company): It's very challenging. We have no time or schedule to design something else, so we, we have to make it work the first shot.
NARRATOR: Thermoplastic wings will be lighter and more durable than conventional wings. There may even be other undiscovered benefits, according to another engineer who first experimented with the material in the '80s, Frank Statkus.
FRANK STATKUS: I personally would love to have thermoplastics on this airplane, because I know that there's value in the future. Even though I can't tell you in all the areas where we might find that value, I do know it's there.
NARRATOR: The future in a word: thermoplastics.
But right now, George Bible needs to solve some pressing problems. Making thermoplastic begins with these sheets of graphite, also known as carbon fiber, the same lightweight material used in fishing rods and tennis rackets. For the wing, it's laid down up to 90 layers deep on top of a giant metal mold or tool.
GEORGE BIBLE: We take layers of these graphite fibers and set them on top of each other, and then we put the resin in between to hold them together.
NARRATOR: After three weeks of lay-up, the wing skin is tightly wrapped in protective bags, ready for the next step, a massive oven called the autoclave. The huge chamber acts like a pressure cooker.
GEORGE BIBLE: The autoclave, for me, is always the most stressful part. You have nightmares at night thinking about all of the terrible things your autoclave could do to it.
NARRATOR: First, all oxygen will be removed to prevent a cataclysmic explosion. Then, with the wing heated to the melting point of lead, nitrogen will be pumped in, raising the pressure and exerting tons of force upon the thermoplastic, forcing the fibers to blend with the resin. In short, this is literally hell on earth.
For the next 30 hours, George Bible will hold his breath, until the cooked skin from the autoclave and a perfectly formed wing skin is revealed.
GEORGE BIBLE: Oh, she looks beautiful doesn't she? Looks good, looks very good.
NARRATOR: But this skin is only the first. Boeing will need three more, one for each side of its two delta-winged X-planes. And although Bible is elated at his success, he knows that the next skin, for the lower wing, will be far trickier. It involves a more complex curved shape.
And, in fact, when the next skin emerges from the autoclave, the first signs are ominous. Creases and folds on the surface hint at hidden structural flaws.
GEORGE BIBLE: Man, that does not look good, those wrinkles. I'm afraid we're dead in the water.
NARRATOR: An instrument scans the surface of the panel using water and sound waves to probe for air pockets that could fatally weaken the wing.
GEORGE BIBLE: When we have a gap in the plies, the sound will not transmit through there well.
NARRATOR: George Bible's worst fears are confirmed. The skin is riddled with defects.
GEORGE BIBLE: Right now I'm just, just exhausted. We can't get a break, I mean it's just downhill. So we'll have to do what we have to do to get a panel down to Palmdale as fast as we can.
NARRATOR: After hundreds of hours of work, the wing skin is worthless. With the first wing frame nearing completion down in Palmdale, Bible's team and its bold experiment are simply running out of time.
Lockheed is facing a crisis of its own. The problem that has brought its entire assembly program to a grinding halt hinges on the hold up of a single crucial part.
RICK REZABEK: We can have 99 percent of everything it takes to assemble the airplane, but if there's one part that hasn't been delivered yet, and it's buried somewhere in the middle of the aircraft, you have to wait on the assembly work until that actually shows up.
NARRATOR: Like Boeing, Lockheed engineers have tried to save money by reducing the number of parts needed to build the plane. One part in particular, bulkhead 270, has ended up especially complicated. It will join the front of the plane, including the cockpit, to the fuselage.
As a key piece holding the plane together, it's made of the metal alloy titanium. The combination of strength and lightness make it a natural choice for the bulkhead. But nobody at the Skunk Works had anticipated how hard it would be to carve such a complicated piece out of this super hard metal.
Machining the 300-pound Lockheed part means whittling away at a solid five-ton slab and the drills running 24 hours a day, using diamond bit saws and a special lubricant to reduce heat.
The pressure to get the Bulkhead done is enormous, but so is the price of any mistake.
DORIAN RACEY (Machinist, Lockheed Martin): If this part fails, it could almost ultimately be the end of our competition with Boeing in the JSF program. I mean it would really set us back.
NARRATOR: On top of the crisis on the shop floor, bad money management threatens to get Lockheed fired from the competition. In a program in large part about affordability, the company admits it's 100 million dollars over budget, Lockheed blames part of the overrun on a 30-million-dollar accounting error.
RICK BAKER (Vice President, Tactical Aircraft, Lockheed Martin): In essence what it was is...we were writing checks without going back into the check register is what it amounted to.
MICHAEL HOUGH: Lockheed, yes, had a problem in the subcontractor management business in their manufacturing end at Palmdale. It wasn't discovered until late, very unfortunate, very disappointing. And the lesson there is, "Take nothing for granted."
NARRATOR: It's a make or break point in the program. Under a powerful escape clause, the government can end the competition and award the fighter contract to Boeing. In the first real test of the military's commitment to fiscal limits, the JSF lets Lockheed off the hook. They're saved by the growing number of international customers now lining up to buy the Joint Strike Fighter.
MICHAEL HOUGH: We've got Canadians, we've got Italians, we've got Danes, we've got Dutch. We've got a little bit of everybody. It ensures that for tomorrow, in coalition warfare, we've got partners with the same capability to fight the same wars as we do.
NARRATOR: Ending the competition early would be a domestic and diplomatic debacle.
JAY MILLER: The government realizes that this program is so big, and so influential on a national, and in fact an international level, that their best bet is effectively to sweep this anomaly under the carpet. Let's forget about it, and let's move on, and let's work under the assumption that Lockheed has learned a lesson and they won't let this happen again.
MICHAEL HOUGH: Well, as disappointing as that was, the silver lining there is that we're doing business a lot, lot better and we'll continue for the future.
NARRATOR: In the end, Lockheed gets slapped on the wrist for bad budget controls and presses on with the program, nearly a year and a half behind schedule.
ED BEURER (Assembly Manager, Lockheed Martin): We can't let one minute go by without paying attention to something out on the floor and getting it done. We can't be slackers anymore.
NARRATOR: But back at Boeing, it's hardly been smooth sailing. The latest results from computer simulations are pointing to an alarming conclusion. Boeing's entire delta wing design may be fundamentally flawed.
The Navy has refined its requirements and wants a more maneuverable plane that can carry more weapons. Boeing's delta wing design is now seriously overweight. Months into building the test planes, Boeing's lead engineers conclude that the only way to lose the pounds is to abandon the delta and come up with a new wing and tail design.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: We are at a point in the process here where we need to make a decision on the tail. I think we're really struggling with which way to go.
NARRATOR: An engineering team led by Dennis Muilenburg must come up with a new tail design that will work on a reconfigured fighter. The conventional choice is called a four poster for its four control surfaces, the tail design for all modern U.S. fighters, including Lockheed's Raptor and its proposed JSF fighter.
But there is an experimental alternative, a novel two-post tail with just two angled control surfaces. The Pelikan tail is named after its inventor, an engineer inherited from McDonnell Douglas, Ralph Pelikan. He argues its merits.
RALPH PELIKAN (Engineer, The Boeing Company): Sure I understand you're all nervous about this new concept. I think it can be done.
NARRATOR: Proponents of the Pelikan tail argue that the design is less visible to enemy radar. In other words, it has a smaller stealth signature. For Boeing, this is an important plus, since Lockheed is the originator and acknowledged master of stealth technology.
FRED MAY: We can't afford to have any question at all over our signature and whether we leave a signature.
MARK MAGNUSSEN: I don't think that we really know enough about the Pelikan tail. We think we can make it work, but how much effort is ahead of us to make it work?
NARRATOR: Those supporting the traditional four post tail argue it's a known quantity. The word on the street is that the JSF program managers favor it for the same reason.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: There's a slight benefit, from a strategy standpoint, that we can negate a perceived Lockheed advantage by going to a four poster. On the other hand we end up looking like the follower with two teams that have the same design.
FRED MAY: I vote for the Pelikan tail. I think we've got to bite the bullet and go there.
RICK REZABEK: I guess maybe I'm still more conservative than Fred, and I would stick with the four poster and try and get the signature to work with the airplane with the four poster.
NARRATOR: The room is deeply divided. In the end, Muilenburg must break the tie.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: Now, I've been a four poster fan up until about an hour ago, all right? I think we can beat the pants off Lockheed when it comes to working weight, handling qualities and aerodynamics. Whether its real or not, they're perceived to have a signature advantage, so we need to do something to our configuration that will give us a signature advantage. I think the Pelikan tail does that. All right?
NARRATOR: Feeling pressure to make a bold choice, Muilenburg chooses the Pelikan tail.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: So we're going to go with the Pelikan tail. We've got some unknowns, we're nervous about some things, so lets go figure out how to make it work.
NARRATOR: But just days later, after Frank Statkus and senior management review the choices, Boeing changes its mind. Concerned about weight and performance, it commits to the more conservative four post tail.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: The four poster is a little safer way to go, so I was a little torn from a personal standpoint. But when we stood back and looked at the data, I think we made the right decision.
NARRATOR: Boeing radically changes the wing and tail design, which gives the proposed fighter a fresh new look. The new plane is projected to be 1,500 pounds lighter and more agile.
But it's too late to incorporate the design changes into Boeing's two test planes, now eight months into assembly. Instead, the company will submit the new configuration with its final proposal. By testing the new design in simulations and wind tunnels, and flight testing the old design, Boeing believes it can prove the soundness of its approach.
GRAHAM WARWICK: To those of us watching JSF from the outside, this is the first sign that all is not well with the Boeing design. Both designs are evolving as the requirements evolve, but it seems that Boeing's design is not as adaptable as Lockheed's. The requirements are still evolving, so there must be concern within the government that Boeing's design can keep up.
MICHAEL HOUGH: There was a lot to be made of the fact that their design's all screwed up, and they couldn't fly, and they couldn't do this, and they were behind and so forth—not the case at all. To me, it was just an improvement in their design according to the requirements. It was very normal, very, very normal.
NARRATOR: Whatever the future holds for the redesign, at least one of Boeing's nightmares is finally over. George Bible's team has finished the troublesome wing skins and is ready to rush them from Seattle to California. The last pair of panels is loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy, the largest cargo jet in the Air Force.
GEORGE BIBLE: Boy, I hope that wind doesn't tip our wing over.
NARRATOR: Bible scrapped the temperamental thermoplastic and cooked up the wing skins from a more conventional composite. Though heavier and less durable, the new wing coverings are finally on their way to Palmdale, still more or less on time and on budget.
FRANK STATKUS: And that's just what happens when you're reaching in technology, sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not.
GEORGE BIBLE: Emotionally, it will be over for me when I see that airplane disappear over the horizon heading south.
NARRATOR: With the wing skins safely in Palmdale, Boeing wastes little time attaching them to the wing box. But before the upper skin can be mated to the structure, critical wiring must be installed.
GEORGE BIBLE: Let's go terminate.
NARRATOR: A lone electrician crawls in between the skin and wing box to connect wiring. Working in the dark under the 700-pound wing skin is a grueling job.
GEORGE BIBLE: I'm going to need a heat gun.
NARRATOR: Hour after hour...
GEORGE BIBLE: Doing good.
NARRATOR: ...wire after wire, each connection is tested and doubled checked.
GEORGE BIBLE: How you doing, Lonnie?
LONNIE: Almost done.
GEORGE BIBLE: You're almost done? Yeah? How many connections you have to do?
LONNIE: Two.
ANDY BALOUGH: He's been in there for four and a half hours...has not come out yet. That's dedication. Now here he comes. Let's see if his legs are still moving.
GEORGE BIBLE: All right, Lonnie, my man. Oh...
NARRATOR: With the wiring done and the skin lowered into place, mechanics will spend the night hand-tightening thousands of fasteners.
Before the wing can be mated to the aircraft another major piece must first be attached to the fuselage. Like a giant gift, the entire front end of the airplane arrives in the Phantom Works hangar.
ANDY BALOUGH: I can't believe my eyes. We waited for all this time and we've finally got it. I can't wait to hook it up.
NARRATOR: The front end, which includes the cockpit with all its intricate electronics, was built in St. Louis, at a former McDonnell Douglas plant, now part of Boeing.
ANDY BALOUGH: Bring her back another three inches.
NARRATOR: But will this front end, built 1,800 miles away, mate up with the rest of the fuselage? The fit must be as precise as the width of a human hair.
CREW MEMBER 1: If we bring this down a little further we'll get the flushness a little better.
CREW MEMBER 2: Yeah. Both up together...bring it back just a little bit more. Bring it back about a half an inch and we're there.
CREW MEMBER 3: That's good, that's good.
NARRATOR: In less than two hours, the installation is complete, and the Boeing X-plane has its distinct face.
WALT CANNON: It's starting to look like an airplane, that's what's really neat about it.
ANDY BALOUGH: Oh no, I see our future contract.
WALT CANNON: Well, that too.
NARRATOR: With the precision fit of the wing, an apparition appears at the Phantom Works: the recognizable outline of the first of the Boeing X-planes. The company is now weeks ahead of schedule, and morale couldn't be higher.
MIKE BRUNER: It went great. It looks like an airplane now. Look at it. Lockheed, watch out!
NARRATOR: What Lockheed is watching out for is an end to its crippling parts delay. Mechanics finally install Bulkhead 270, which took five long months to carve out of titanium. Ed Beurer nervously waits to see if it will fit. If it does, a plane will quickly take shape around it. If it doesn't, it's game over for Lockheed.
Designed on the latest computers, cut with diamond tipped bits, only to be installed with a sandbag.
ED BEURER: That is a beautiful piece of job.
NARRATOR: In the race to complete its X-planes, Lockheed still trails Boeing by months, but the manufacturing team plans to fly full throttle to the finish.
RICK REZABEK: Basically this place is, you know, populated by a bunch of airplane nuts. So it's a very high pace, and that pace is not going to slacken up at all. It's going to continue.
NARRATOR: To underscore its commanding lead over Lockheed, Boeing stages a public relations coup at the Phantom Works. In a surprise move, Boeing has assembled both of its test planes for the media event.
FRANK STATKUS: Ladies and Gentlemen, the X-32A and the X-32B concept demonstrator aircrafts. What do you think?
NARRATOR: In an aerospace tradition called rollout, the company shows off its brainchild, in two different versions, to the world. It's a moment of high emotion for Boeing Program Manager Frank Statkus.
FRANK STATKUS: It's everything that we've done for the last three and a half years. It's all your successes, it's all your thoughts, it's all your weekend work, it's all your overtime. It's the soul that's in that airplane, because each and every one of us sweated bullets to put it there.
NARRATOR: Rollout is a milestone for the Boeing team. But as things stand now, Frank Statkus with wings would get in the air faster than the X-planes. They may have soul, but they don't yet have brains.
Hundreds of thousands of lines of vital software code is still under development, to manage every function of the X-planes. That work gets tested here in a multi-million dollar simulator. Boeing's lead test pilot Fred Knox puts the faux fighter through its paces.
FRED KNOX: How about we look at twenty knots crosswind? Just give it a little on the side.
NARRATOR: Modern fighters are designed to be aerodynamically unstable. Under computer control, that aerial volatility transforms into acrobatic agility.
FRED KNOX: Okay, now I have crosswinds. Roger that.
NARRATOR: Every simulated flight by Knox helps refine this essential software.
FRED KNOX: The flight control software, it controls the airplane, the way it flies, but it also turns on the air conditioner. It raises and lowers the landing gear. It navigates for us. It does every critical element, every critical safety element in the airplane. If we haven't done the development here the airplane will not fly.
Touchdown.
NARRATOR: But less than two months after rollout, the software development suddenly goes off line.
Boeing is crippled by the largest white-collar strike in American history. Seventeen thousand aerospace engineers are off the job, including more than a hundred developing the X-planes flight controls. Progress inside the Boeing Phantom Works grinds to nearly a halt, while outside, a small group of engineers joins the strike.
WALT CANNON: It's a bad situation for everybody. You know, everybody really has real mixed emotions, I think, and is real conflicted about it.
NARRATOR: Forty days later the strike ends, but Boeing doesn't escape unscathed.
FRANK STATKUS: The strike on our program is a terrible wound. We lost weeks of schedule. Those weeks will not be recovered.
NARRATOR: With the setbacks, Boeing's lead over Lockheed evaporates. After years of jousting back and forth, these two combatants are galloping toward the tournament grounds, toward the arena where X-planes and test pilots meet their fate.
It's time for this battle to take to the air. Just 30 miles away from the Skunk and Phantom Works lies the proving grounds for all of America's X-planes, Edwards Air Force Base.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE (Test Pilot, The Boeing Company): Edwards Air Force Base is a tremendous facility, and one of the hallmarks of that facility is the lakebed. It's about 12 miles wide, it's 20 miles long, and it's a very hard flat surface. And you can put the airplane down, and you don't have to worry about running out of runway because you've got the whole lakebed in front of you.
NARRATOR: With these wide-open spaces, Edwards and experimental planes go back to the first supersonic flights. Here the original X-plane, the X-1 flown by Chuck Yeager, broke the sound barrier over half a century ago. Since then, aviation triumphs and tragedies have made Edwards the hallowed ground of X-plane history.
Now these skies will hold an epic contest never seen before, a battle between X-planes.
JAY MILLER: Historically, we have 47 X-airplane programs. This is the first time in history, ever, that any two of those X-airplanes have competed against each other for a production contract. It's unprecedented.
NARRATOR: It's time for Boeing's dream to take flight, while Lockheed can only watch from the ground. After years of derision as a second rate contender, Boeing proves even an underdog like its X-32 can have its day.
FRED KNOX: This is Freddy Knox from The Boeing Company. We're getting ready to launch the X-32 on its first flight this morning, and I wonder if I could get a little forecast for the winds? Say from about 7:30 a.m.?
NARRATOR: Fred Knox, Boeing's Chief Test Pilot and a key developer of the X-plane, will take the craft on its maiden flight.
FRED KNOX: I appreciate your help this morning. Bye bye.
MIKE JORGENSEN: Good day to go?
FRED KNOX: It's an excellent day to go.
NARRATOR: With the fate of the Boeing effort resting on his shoulders, Knox receives a final blessing from Frank Statkus.
FRANK STATKUS: Have fun. We'll see you at the other end.
FRED KNOX: Absolutely.
For me, it's about as big a day as a test pilot is ever going to have, a chance to go do a first flight. It's a big day for me. It's a big day for the rest of the team. We've spent four years now, working very hard—everybody, from flight controls to A.P.U. pumps, to structure, a lot of hard work—and we should get a nice, safe flight in.
CREW MEMBER 4: Have a great flight.
FRED KNOX: It's a big day for all of us. See you guys at Edwards!
It couldn't be a nicer day.
FRANK STATKUS: I'm excited, I'm pumped. We're ready to go. Everybody's smiling. Look at that.
FRED KNOX: Looking sharp sir, F-8 forever you bet.
FRANK STATKUS: There's my team.
NARRATOR: If Fred Knox is nervous, he doesn't show it. Even after finding some stray tools in the cockpit.
FRANK STATKUS: Two of them.
FRED KNOX: Home, sweet home!
NARRATOR: Knox is alone in the plane, but he has plenty of company in the air. Two chase planes flown by other test pilots will monitor his flight.
BARB GLEICH (Mechanic, The Boeing Company): It's going to be exciting...finally. All of our life is in there, blood, sweat and tears.
NARRATOR: Like proud parents, the weary engineers and mechanics of the Phantom Works gather to see their fighter off.
FRED KNOX: Ready for takeoff on Runway 7. Be an airborne pickup from Salty Dog, and NASA 852 will be joining us.
CONTROL: Control copies. Read you loud and clear, and we are ready.
FRED KNOX: And I'm going to go flying.
NARRATOR: Today's flight isn't a round trip. The Boeing plane is leaving the Phantom Works for good to take up residence at Edwards Air Force Base, a short distance away.
CREW MEMBERS: Yes!
Woohoo!
Holy Christ!
WALT CANNON: I was bawling like a baby. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was excitement. I mean, mainly a huge sense of relief.
NARRATOR: Within minutes the X-plane is in the airspace over Edwards, wheels down, just in case. Knox has flown this plane for hundreds of hours in a simulator. Now he gets to see if the real thing handles the same way.
FRED KNOX: I'm happy with the plane.
NARRATOR: Then Boeing Test Pilot Dennis O'Donoghue, in his chase plane, spots a problem.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: This is Irish on the starboard side. You've got hydraulic fluid leaking from about the forward mid-fuselage.
FRED KNOX: I'm just guessing it's the first flight stuff going out a little bit, but uh, we'll watch it.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: It doesn't appear to be dissipating. I'll keep an eye on it.
FRED KNOX: Roger.
NARRATOR: With the source of the leak uncertain, Knox is told to cut short his long awaited flight.
FRED KNOX: We're just going to give you the abbreviated test points, and we'll set up for a landing here.
CONTROL: Congratulations, Fred. Well done.
FRED KNOX: Hey, we got airborne.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: There she is. Got one flight under her belt.
FRED KNOX: We dropped a little fluid out of it. We never lost...everything stayed up. It was full normal landing. The flying quality is about eleven.
O'Donoghue was getting nervous. He couldn't stand the fluid any more. Hey, so it was time to land, huh?
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Yeah, it was definitely time to land. The moment I saw it, it was time to land.
NARRATOR: The hydraulic leak turns out to be minor, a tiny glitch in an otherwise triumphant day.
Over Edwards, Boeing begins a series of test flights. During each one, the pilot puts the plane through a specific set of maneuvers known as test points. Sensors document the plane's flying characteristics. The results go to the JSF.
So far, the plane's performance closely mirrors the Boeing simulations, a sign of just how sophisticated computer design has become.
FRED KNOX: Every pilot has been astounded at how closely the airplane actually matches what we thought it would do, from air speeds and flying qualities and system performance. That's just been really a good surprise.
NARRATOR: While this version of the Boeing X-plane is intended for both the Air Force and Navy, it's the Navy requirements that will be the most demanding.
Commander Phil Yates, call sign Rowdy, is the official Navy Test Pilot assigned to the Boeing effort. For him, it was an unexpected honor.
COMMANDER PHIL "ROWDY" YATES (Test Pilot, U.S. Navy): I received a phone call: "How would you like to be the first Navy pilot to fly the JSF?" Well, after picking my chin up off the ground, I said, "Yeah, I think I'd like to do that."
NARRATOR: Carrier landings are a testament to the precision skill of Navy pilots, and Rowdy is one of the best.
In preparation for testing the Boeing X-plane, he takes an F-18 Hornet out for a spin.
ROWDY YATES: Okay, good nozzles, good hydraulic pressure, good RPMs. There's the salute, here we go.
And we're off, man.
Carrier landings are probably the most demanding task a pilot may be faced with, especially at night in adverse conditions—pitching deck, bad weather. You have to be able to precisely control the airplane.
NARRATOR: Flying at about 150 miles per hour, Navy pilots aim for a target zone of only 120 feet, about the size of a tennis court. They must catch one of four arresting cables.
Pilots don't apply brakes. In fact, at contact with the flight deck, they gun the engine to full power so that if the plane misses the cables there is enough thrust to get airborne.
ROWDY YATES: If landing on a runway is like threading a belt through a belt loop, landing on a carrier is like threading a needle.
NARRATOR: A test pilot's job is to jump into a plane in which he may have little experience and report on its pros and cons.
ROWDY YATES: When you start doing that in an airplane that's never been flown before, then it, it really is what gets a test pilot, I think, excited.
NARRATOR: What's exciting to a test pilot would be sheer terror to most people.
Here at Edwards, Rowdy will put Boeing's X-plane through the precision maneuvers of a carrier landing.
ROWDY YATES: We all recognize that these are unproven airplanes, but we, as test pilots, deal with that, that we're going to be able to handle any situation that the aircraft presents to us. If we don't feel that way, we wouldn't be flying.
NARRATOR: The Boeing team has worked hard to minimize the danger, but the test requires Rowdy to fly so close to the ground, any error or technical problem may be fatal. A section of runway has been marked off, equal to the landing strip on a carrier deck.
ROWDY YATES: God, IT goes.
CONTROL: Roger that, Phantom 3.
NARRATOR: From a control room miles away, a team of Boeing engineers monitors the X-plane's every move.
ROWDY YATES: The pilot learns what kind of corrections and control inputs he has to make, and then it's also the aircraft's ability to respond to those control inputs. It's that combination that ultimately determines how well the airplane is going to do at the ship.
NARRATOR: As he would on a real carrier, Rowdy receives visual cues from an optical landing aid called the Fresnel Lens. If he can line up an amber light called the meatball correctly, Rowdy knows he's approaching at a safe angle for a successful touchdown.
He gets additional tips from a landing signal officer on the ground. On a real carrier this officer would give a score to every landing.
Low start in the middle.
LIEUTENANT JOHN "GOAT" BROTEMARKLE (U.S. Navy): We're not really trying to grade the pilot on what Rowdy's doing. He's a skilled aviator who knows how to make the corrections...
Roger, Paul.
...so what were trying to look, is find out how the airplane is performing with certain deviations applied to it.
NARRATOR: With each attempt the degree of difficulty goes up. To recreate real-world conditions, Rowdy begins an approach descending too fast, or at too steep an angle, and then tries to correct for it.
ROWDY YATES: Man, that's amazing.
NARRATOR: The X in X-plane means experimental, but occasionally it means unexpected.
On one test flight, pilot Dennis O'Donoghue runs into trouble.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: We were just doing a routine test with the aircraft, to see if we ever lost the engine could we crank the engine back up and get it relit.
AIRPLANE COMPUTER VOICE: Caution.
NARRATOR: Suddenly a warning light comes on indicating the X-plane's landing brakes have failed.
AIRPLANE COMPUTER VOICE: Flight control.
CONTROL 1: Talk to him. Do you want to reset or stall?
CONTROL 2: He can't reset. He's got to bring it home.
CONTROL 1: Phantom 3? Control. We need you to R.T.B.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: R.T.B.? Can I reset?
CONTROL 1: Negative.
NARRATOR: Suspecting the warning light is at fault, O'Donoghue brings the plane in to land on the runway. Without brakes, he will quickly run out of room, risking injury to himself and his reputation. Wrecking a multi-million dollar X-plane doesn't look good on the resume.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: On touchdown, I press the brake pedals—no response. So it was just a matter of adding power and getting airborne again.
CONTROL 1: Phantom 3? Control. We need you to R.T.B.
NARRATOR: With the brakes definitely gone, it's time for Plan B: saving a 21st century plane using a two- million-year-old lakebed.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: I had plenty of lakebed in front of me. I touched down and just let the aircraft roll to a stop. Had we not had the lakebed, that would have been a much more critical emergency, much more critical.
NARRATOR: After a month of successful flights, Boeing's luck has run out. Repairing the brakes reveals a major software problem and the plane's grounded.
To make matters worse, Boeing no longer has the skies over Edwards to itself. That very day, Lockheed's X-plane is finally ready to leave its factory home and head into battle.
TOM MORGENFELD: Do the funky chicken here.
NARRATOR: The X-plane's first flight is in the hands of Chief Test Pilot Tom Morgenfeld. Having flown everything from the first Stealth fighter to black aircraft that are still classified, Morgenfeld has unrivaled experience.
Yet he is all too familiar with the dangers of flight test. In 1992, while piloting an Air Force prototype, a computer malfunction sends Morgenfeld's aircraft into a violent oscillation. After skidding in flames for more than a mile, Morgenfeld walks away unharmed.
Now, nearly a decade later, the legendary test pilot is about to climb into another untested fighter.
TOM MORGENFELD: No turning back now. I think I've committed myself, huh?
The first time you fly an airplane it's a tremendous thrill, your heart's pumping and the adrenaline is flowing, believe me.
NARRATOR: In a Lockheed tradition, Morgenfeld carries with him the wallets and car keys of Assembly Manager Ed Beurer and the rest of the senior X-plane team. It's a sign of confidence.
ED BEURER: Go, Tommy.
TOM MORGENFELD: We're airborne, gang, and it's flying great.
CONTROL: Roger, copy.
ED BEURER: I am so filled with emotion right now. Oh, man.
TOM MORGENFELD: Woohoo! This is fun. All complete, feels great.
Roger. Gear coming on my count. Three, two, one, now. And the doors are open. Smoothed out beautifully.
CONTROL: Roger. Copy that, Hat Trick.
NARRATOR: After 22 minutes the first flight is over. Lockheed's X-plane touches down at its new home.
CONTROL: Welcome to Edwards, and you're cleared for the shutdown.
TOM MORGENFELD: Roger that.
ED BEURER: That's a beautiful man up there right now, taking care of my baby.
TOM MORGENFELD: What an airplane! We did it man, we did it. What a thrill! Thank you, brother.
ED BEURER: Sorry. I had to hold you, I had to hold you.
TOM MORGENFELD: You set me up. Good job, man. Ah, Les. Good job, man. What an airplane, what an airplane! Magnificent! It felt great. It was super, yes. Thank you so much.
RICK REZABEK: God, it looked so awesome.
TOM MORGENFELD: Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Rick. I wish we had done a little bit more. I was waiting for it to just keep on flying. The airplane's ready, too. It feels great.
RICK REZABEK: We're going to fly the shit out of this airplane and just kick ass everyday. That's what it's all about.
NARRATOR: True to Rezabek's word, the Lockheed X-plane is back in the sky the very next day. A carefully orchestrated series of maneuvers slowly reveals this jet's true capabilities.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL PAUL "T.P." SMITH (JSF Chief Test Pilot, U.S. Air Force): "Baby steps" is a very good way to put it, very small analytical, incremental steps. We don't want go out and push the airplane or the pilot or the test team beyond their capabilities.
NARRATOR: Lieutenant Colonel Paul Smith, call sign T.P., is the JSF's chief test pilot, brought in from the Air Force and assigned to the Lockheed effort. Like all the pilots, he's spent hours in the simulator. But it didn't quite prepare him for the feel of the real thing.
T.P. SMITH: Probably the most incredible experience I felt was the enormous power behind me of the engine. I've never had this happen to me, but it's probably synonymous with being shot out of a fire hose. Just a very steady, incredible amount of acceleration, right through your back. And the feeling like this was a stallion that was ready to go anywhere, any place I wanted it to. And if I just let it go, it would go there.
NARRATOR: The Lockheed plane is like a stallion in another way as well. Like all fighters, when it comes to fuel, it eats like a horse. While not a JSF requirement, Lockheed wants to tank up its plane through aerial refueling. And to make up for lost time, Lockheed's ambitious test schedule depends on it.
T.P. SMITH: There was a lot of pressure to get the aerial fueling certification done so we could start tanking. The amount of time we could spend in the air before that was about 30 minutes, realistically, and that was just not enough time to get everything done that we need to get done.
NARRATOR: With only two flights in the X-plane under his belt, T.P. will attempt one of the most dangerous missions of the Lockheed program.
T.P. SMITH: Air-to-air tanking has always been kind of intimidating to me, because throughout my career I've been taught, "Don't let anything touch your airplane. Don't let another aircraft hit it, don't let ground fire hit it, don't let missiles hit it." And then the first thing you do is you go up to this tanker and the tanker hits you.
NARRATOR: At 20,000 feet, T.P. rendezvous with a KC-135, heavily loaded with fuel. The tanker slowly extends a boom toward a receptacle located behind the cockpit of the X-plane.
T.P. SMITH: It's really a basic feeling of trust between you and the guy flying the boom to make sure he doesn't hit the airplane where he's not supposed to.
NARRATOR: T.P. cautiously edges closer.
T.P. SMITH: At that point you just have to fly very stable because he's trying to plug that boom in the back of the aircraft.
NARRATOR: Running low on fuel with only minutes before having to abort, T.P. makes contact.
T.P. SMITH: You can actually feel it in the airplane. You feel like you're part of the tanker and it can actually fly you around. At that point, you just kind of relax or try to relax and stay in that same position while you download gas.
NARRATOR: X-plane and tanker are now coupled in tight formation at 350 miles per hour. Less than five minutes later, the crucial maneuver is over.
T.P. SMITH: This airplane flew tremendously well on the boom, better than any other airplane I've flown. And so it was very easy to get confident in yourself and confident in the airplane very quickly.
NARRATOR: For the competition, Lockheed designed its X-plane to use the Air Force system of aerial refueling, but Boeing's gone with the Navy's version.
With its software bugs fixed, Boeing's X-plane is back in the air.
Navy planes have a fuel probe designed to plug into a drogue basket at the end of a hose dangling from the tanker. But during Boeing's first refueling attempt, the basket flies dangerously close to instruments mounted on the nose. These test sensors are used only for evaluating the plane's performance, but if the basket breaks them off, they may be sucked into the engine. That could bring down the plane.
And that's not the only problem. When the refueling basket makes it onto the probe, it fails to seat properly, sending gas everywhere but the tank. In a blow to the Boeing effort, aerial refueling is ruled out as too dangerous.
JAY MILLER: I'm sure that Boeing's engineering staff was somewhat puzzled by all this. There was some serious study work done, there were a lot of engineering studies that were conducted, but converting that data to the full-scale finished artifact is often times a little bit of a magical process, and it doesn't always work out.
NARRATOR: For the remainder of flight testing, the Boeing X-plane gets its gas on the ground. And the company's month head start on Lockheed drips away.
JAY MILLER: Every time they have to land and refuel they're losing time. While they're doing that, Lockheed Martin is in the air and their completing all of their flight test objectives.
NARRATOR: For Lockheed, one goal has remained out of reach. In a month of test flights, its X-plane achieves mach 0.98, just short of breaking the sound barrier.
Like aerial refueling, the JSF doesn't require a demonstration of supersonic flight. But with only three more test flights of this version of their X-plane left, Lockheed wants to hear the boom.
RICK REZABEK: Today we're going to go supersonic for the first time. It's an emotional victory as much as anything else.
DICK BURTON (Flight Test Director, Lockheed Martin): People understand supersonic that work in this industry, and it's a very, very big thing. The crew has worked out here for, now, approaching 30 days, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and it's nice to give them a lift.
NARRATOR: The Lockheed X-plane team has struggled with a host of small but stubborn problems that have kept the plane subsonic. But at the end of a long day of flying, with test pilot Morganfeld at the controls, all that is forgotten when the Lockheed plane crosses the boundary originally shattered in the same skies by the very first X-plane.
Lighting the afterburner provides the extra push needed to go supersonic.
TOM MORGENFELD: Yeehaw. That was so amazing!
RICK REZABEK: It means a very successful end to a hugely successful first month of flying X-35s.
NARRATOR: Lockheed arrived late to flight test, but made up for it with a record-setting performance for an X-plane, 27 flights in 30 days.
A month later, Boeing's X-plane goes supersonic as well. The aircraft's grace in the air and strong test results have quieted the critics of its less than sleek shape.
Driven by the competition, each company has taken its X-plane to new levels of performance only to see its adversary do the same.
CURTIS PEEBLES: You had two aircraft prototypes and yet they were flying several times a day, and this is unheard of for X-planes. And it's a testament to both designs and both design teams that they were able to do this.
BILL SWEETMAN: Both teams set out to demonstrate a certain number of test points. They both seem to have done it. Both aircraft flew; they were pretty reliable. I don't think there's anything that's come out of this stage of the program that would say that one or the other is going to win.
JAY MILLER: That Boeing airplane is much more a competitor than anybody—and particularly Lockheed—really expected. I don't see any distinct advantage to either airplane. At this stage in the game, I'd have to tell you that it is neck and neck.
NARRATOR: Both Boeing and Lockheed realize the entire competition and the largest military contract ever, may come down to the JSF's final requirement, achieving the Harrier trick of landing vertically.
Houdini once made a five-ton elephant disappear. Lockheed plans an even greater feat: to levitate over three times that weight, a 17-ton fighter, using its radical new lift-fan. The fate of the competition and perhaps even the fate of the company rests on this untested system.
JAY MILLER: All of their eggs are in this one basket. If they do lose, effectively, Lockheed Martin as a fighter production entity in the United States, that will come to an end. They have nothing else to keep their front doors open.
NARRATOR: Lockheed engineers install their lift fan system into the X-plane, hopefully transforming it into that hybrid of the skies, a vertically landing jet.
While it remains unproven, the concept behind their unique lift-fan system exudes engineering elegance. Two columns of air, instead of one in the Harrier, balance the plane's descent. One column is the engine exhaust directed downward. The other column is created by a lift-fan connected to the engine by a drive shaft. The fan takes in air from above and blasts it out below. It's an ingenious system, but in practice it requires a symphony of moving parts.
BILL SWEETMAN: Lockheed has chosen a very complex solution. If something goes mechanically catastrophically wrong during the hover, you have very, very little time to get out.
NARRATOR: A former Royal Navy pilot with Harrier combat experience in the Falklands and Bosnia, Simon Hargreaves will attempt the first hover in the Lockheed X-plane. He's spent years in preparation. Still, there's no question he's about to take a ride on the wild side.
SIMON HARGREAVES: Nobody's ever tried to model a propulsion system that's quite as complex as this, as, quite as integrated as this, so there may be some areas there where the airplane doesn't respond exactly as I'm expecting.
NARRATOR: The vertical landing tests will start over a hover pit, ten feet deep and covered by a steel grate. The hover pit is designed to minimize the chance the engine will suck in its own hot exhaust. Hot gas ingestion is a familiar danger to Harrier pilots. If the exhaust used to float the plane somehow enters the engine's air intake, the engine will start to choke.
JAY MILLER: What happens when you ingest hot gas, your thrust decays; your thrust decays, you lose lift; you lose lift, you start descending at a rapid rate, and can lead to a catastrophic accident.
NARRATOR: Venting the hot gases out the side of the hover pit provides some protection.
SCOTT WINSHIP: Here we go. Seventy percent, throttle up. Come on, Simon. Come on, baby. Up the power.
NARRATOR: Hargreaves holds steady twenty feet in the air. At 35-thousand pounds, it's the heaviest fighter ever to hover.
CREW MEMBER 5: Wow.
NARRATOR: The lift fan performs without incident and produces 1,500 pounds more thrust than predicted.
SCOTT WINSHIP: That was great.
RICK REZABEK: That was incredible. Let's do that again. Incredible.
NARRATOR: After nearly two years of struggling to keep up with Boeing, the Lockheed team now has reason to display their usual abundance of self-confidence.
RICK REZABEK: We've never had a doubt in our minds at any point in this program that this is the right type of airplane and propulsion system. And we've felt very sorry for the competing team against us.
SCOTT WINSHIP: I never felt sorry for them.
RICK REZABEK: Yeah, that's true.
NARRATOR: While the lift fan works, Lockheed still hasn't accomplished the tricky mid-air maneuver called conversion, going from level flight to vertical landing, with its complicated dance of moving parts.
The same morning Lockheed lifts off, Boeing plans a dramatic demonstration of its own vertical lift system. The company's second X-plane has been flown across the country. The new proximity to Washington decision-makers and lobbyists doesn't hurt, but the real advantage is invisible.
The air at sea level has greater density than at the high altitude location of Edwards Air Force Base. Thicker air means better engine performance.
In this test of its direct lift system, Boeing hopes to outdo Lockheed. Test Pilot Dennis O'Donoghue will start in level flight, slow the plane down to nothing and hover. His slow speed will make the wings useless, and a failure of the lift system will mean the plane falls from the sky.
To give O'Donoghue a chance to eject, Boeing has conducted its early tests at higher altitudes gradually working lower and slower. Now, after 43 flights, Boeing is ready to go all the way, to attempt zero airspeed.
NANCYLEW O'DONOGHUE: I've got butterflies.
NARRATOR: O'Donoghue's family is among the spectators of today's historic event.
NANCYLEW O'DONOGHUE : The boys are really excited, too. I think Dennis slept because he knew he needed to. The boys slept. I didn't sleep a wink.
Look, Daddy's airplane. Yes.
NARRATOR: Two hundred feet above the runway, O'Donoghue slowly decelerates to zero airspeed and hovers. A 28,000-pound airplane hangs frozen in the sky.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Irish. It looks good here. Yeah, the hover performance looks real good, numbers were looking pretty nice.
CONTROL: And just for the record, pilot, yeah? You are my hero!
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Pretty cool, eh?
CONTROL: You got that right! Congratulations, Dennis.
ROWDY YATES: Oh my god, what a day. I'm sitting there yelling and clapping and crying, driving up, seeing it just right there.
NARRATOR: On this day the X-32B hovers four times—once for two and a half minutes—and, demonstrating rock solid control, performs a perfect 360-degree turn.
NANCYLEW O'DONOGHUE: That was just wonderful. Brendan said it was better than Star Wars, and for him, that's a lot.
NARRATOR: One month later, Boeing is ready to make history. If it works, the X-32 will become the first new fighter since the Harrier to transition from conventional flight to landing vertically.
For this risky mission, Boeing will also use a hover pit to reduce the chances of hot exhaust being ingested into the engine during the landing. To increase the margin of safety, Boeing engineers have removed some exterior parts to lighten the X-plane's weight.
Some critics will cry foul, but Boeing will respond that its new design, which it didn't have time to build but will submit to the JSF as its final proposal, is 1500 pounds lighter.
Dennis O'Donoghue is in the cockpit again, while flight test conductor Howard Gofus will closely monitor the mission from the ground.
HOWARD GOFUS (Flight Test Conductor, The Boeing Company): Now there's fewer unknowns. We know we can do it, we know we've been there, we know what we've seen so far, but we're still only one failure away from having a really bad day.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Okay, coming up to fifty feet. Here we go.
NARRATOR: Closing in over the pit the Boeing X-plane comes to a stop and begins a slow descent. If disaster strikes, O'Donoghue is now too low to eject.
CONTROL: Tee-two, tee-two, watch tee-two. In hover. Caution, caution...
NARRATOR: Suddenly the controllers spot trouble.
AIRPLANE COMPUTER VOICE: Caution, caution.
NARRATOR: Invisibly. the engine has ingested hot gas from the lift nozzles and loses power.
CONTROL: Caution! Knock it off one!
NARRATOR: O'Donoghue feels the bottom dropping out, but it's too late to abort.
CONTROL: Howard we're coming down. Twenty feet!
NARRATOR: Twenty feet and only seconds from the ground the gas dissipates and the engine gains enough thrust to touch down safely.
CONTROL: Excellent landing.
HOWARD GOFUS: He's down on the ground and we realize it, and so there's the, you're in a quandary for that split second. Okay, we just did our first v.l. What happened?
NARRATOR: Over by the runway, no one is aware of the close call. Reviewing the data, the test team believes a choice made to increase safety, the hover pit, may be causing the problem. There's almost no crosswind to clear the pit of exhaust. Hot gas may be collecting and bouncing upward into the air.
They decide to attempt a second vertical landing but on a solid surface.
HOWARD GOFUS: We decided we were going to go for the vertical landing on the pad, so we set up all the numbers...set it all up and know that, hey, the same thing could happen there.
CONTROL: Looking good so far. Good one.
NARRATOR: The second vertical landing goes without a hitch, to everyone's enormous relief.
But just a week later, during another vertical landing, an old friend pays an unwelcome visit. It's a pop stall, the result of hot gas ingestion just above the ground, a common event in Harriers. Boeing engineers predicted it might happen and designed it out of their new version. But they decide to play it safe and stop testing their vertical system.
A month later, Boeing completes all major requirements for the Pentagon ahead of the competition.
HOWARD GOFUS: Hey, Frank, that's our man. Oh boy.
CREW MEMBER: Hey, Howard. Yes sir. We did it. Yes sir.
NARRATOR: It's a major landmark, and if anything has them worried the Boeing brass certainly doesn't show it.
FRANK STATKUS: I'm confident that we are AT the head of the class now, and I expect to stay there.
CREW MEMBER: All right, one more time. Yeah!
NARRATOR: The Lockheed plane now needs to prove it's ready for primetime by performing the critical transition from conventional flight to hover to landing vertically.
SIMON HARGREAVES: We need to demonstrate that we can land on a solid surface, both to make sure we've got the performance and the flying qualities to do that—to make sure that we've dealt with ground effects such as hot gas ingestion—and to prove that we can land on a normal sort of surface without damage or significant erosion to the surface.
Converting in three, two, one, now.
NARRATOR: At a thousand feet, Simon Hargreaves engages the lift fan and slows down. With air from the front and exhaust from the rear nozzle in balance, the Lockheed X-plane floats on nearly 40-thousand pounds of thrust.
This system avoids the problems of the Harrier and Boeing's direct lift. Cooler air from the lift fan creates an invisible barrier that prevents the engine from choking on its own hot gas.
After two minutes of hovering, Hargreaves eases off the throttle and gently guides the X-plane down.
SIMON HARGREAVES: That's beautiful, no problems at all.
CONTROL: Well done, Simon.
CREW MEMBER: Good job, Simon...honor
CREW MEMBER: Yeah, great Simon! Simon, looks like you've been doing that for twenty years.
SIMON HARGREAVES: It felt like it, yeah.
DICK BURTON: It's been a long time coming, and um, about the only thing I can say is yes!
SAM WILSON: It's going to be a tough choice, if one guy had stumbled here at the end then it would've made it easy.
ERIC DIDOMINICO (Joint Strike Fighter Program Office): It's not an easy choice and that's what the government wanted. The government wanted a close horse race, and I think they're going to get it now.
NARRATOR: In the waning days of the competition, at an undisclosed location somewhere near the Pentagon, JSF Director General Michael Hough takes NOVA inside a world where cameras have never been allowed. Behind a wall of security the secret proposals of Boeing and Lockheed are being evaluated by the government team that will help determine the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter program.
MICHAEL HOUGH: This is where the proposals are, all electronic of course. This is where we've got 200 people off and on coming in and looking at the proposals one at a time, gauging them against the operational requirements document.
NARRATOR: Digging through mountains of data, experts evaluate performance, cost, management and risk.
DAN NIELSON (Contracts Director, Joint Strike Fighter): Some of them are doing aerodynamic performance, figuring out: How fast will it go? What is the range? How will it turn? What kind of Gs can it sustain? Others are evaluating software and architecture.
NARRATOR: Now near the end of this jury process, the results are one of JSF's most closely guarded secrets.
MICHAEL HOUGH: We've got about six weeks left, by which we're going to take the results of our evaluation, give it to the Secretary of the Air Force who, in harmony with the Secretary of the Navy, is going to make a decision of who's going to build the airplane for the warfighter for the next forty years.
NARRATOR: As the final decision approaches, known in military speak as "down select," Boeing remains confident that its manufacturing know-how and cost saving designs have made it a winner.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: I think we all feel pretty good about going into down select, and I think we truly believe that we've got the right vehicle for the customer.
NARRATOR: But just before it crosses the finish line, Lockheed plans a final dramatic display, a bid for the history books and bait for the huge government contract.
In a test flight Lockheed dubs Mission X, its fighter takes off in less than 500 feet, then goes supersonic and lands vertically. Since the Harrier is subsonic, the maneuver is a milestone in aviation history and a direct hit on Boeing's need to strip off parts for vertical landing and reinstall them for supersonic flight.
But the Lockheed team pushes its luck too far. They attempt a vertical takeoff and transition to conventional flight. When the plane bobbles in the wind on liftoff the mission is aborted. But the failure does nothing to dampen Lockheed's legendary mix of technical ingenuity and engineering arrogance. This company believes it has won the right to build the first fighter of the 21st century.
RICK REZABEK: We did our part of the bargain, now the rest of it is up to the government.
NARRATOR: Five years after the battle began it's D-day. The decision is in the bag. The contractors anxiously await the news. In Palmdale, California, Rick Rezabek and a few hundred members of the Lockheed team gather in the X-plane hangar.
RICK REZABEK: We did as much as we needed to, to win this thing, and "we're" very, I don't know, very comfortably, anxiously nervous and confident.
SCOTT WINSHIP: We did the best we could.
RICK REZABEK: Yeah.
NARRATOR: While in an office in Seattle, the leaders of Boeing's X-plane program, Frank Statkus and company Vice Chairman Harry Stonecipher stand by for word.
HARRY STONECIPHER (Vice Chairman, The Boeing Company): Where are we going to be able to watch this thing from?
FRANK STATKUS: Right here.
HARRY STONECIPHER: Let's watch it.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE: We are here today to announce the largest acquisition program in the history of the Department of Defense, the Joint Strike Fighter. The value of the program could be in excess of two hundred billion dollars.
Two contractor teams, one led by Lockheed Martin and the other led by Boeing, have just completed a concept development phase. Both contractor teams met or exceeded the performance objectives established for the aircraft.
DR. JAMES G. ROCHE (Secretary of the United States Air Force): The process involved, at the end...was about two hundred and fifty people. And both proposals were very good, both demo programs were very good. But on the basis of strengths, weaknesses and degrees of risk of the program, it is our conclusion, joined in by our colleagues in the United Kingdom, that the Lockheed Martin team is the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter program on the best value basis.
PHIL CONDIT: Frank, tell your team they did an unbelievably good job. I could not have asked for more.
NARRATOR: In a call from Washington, Boeing C.E.O. Phil Condit consoles his team.
FRANK STATKUS: Is it a winner-take-all, Phil?
PHIL CONDIT: At this point the answer is yes, that this decision they've held to is a winner-take-all.
HARRY STONECIPHER: You did a great job.
FRANK STATKUS: I'm sorry.
HARRY STONECIPHER: No, you did a great job. I don't know what we missed.
CURTIS PEEBLES: In my mind, the Boeing redesign, the hot gas ingestion, makes me wonder if, for Boeing to win, Lockheed's lift fan engine had to fail.
BILL SWEETMAN: One of the biggest deciding factors in this competition, in my opinion, was that Boeing never managed to make a vertical landing with the aircraft in complete configuration.
They took the inlet cowl off. They took the landing gear doors off. Lockheed Martin made complete vertical landings with the aircraft in the same trim that it could go to supersonic speed in.
NARRATOR: The X-35, now officially designated the F-35, may become the most widely deployed fighter ever produced.
JAY MILLER: I think it's ironic that Lockheed, in 1943, in effect, gave birth under the auspices of the Skunk Works, to the Lockheed P-80, which was the first successful operational jet fighter used by the U.S. military. And here it is almost sixty years later, and they are now the winner of the JSF competition, which could result in, potentially, the last manned jet fighter. It's the closing of a major chapter in the history of U.S. air power.
NARRATOR: With a buy-in from the services and billions in foreign sales, the future of the F-35 looks bright. But fasten your seat belts there may be turbulence ahead.
GRAHAM WARWICK: Now the fun really begins, because Lockheed has to deliver on its cost and performance promises for the JSF, and the government's already talking about cutting the number of airplanes it's going to buy and spending more on unmanned combat air vehicles.
NARRATOR: And who's one of the top builders of unmanned combat air vehicles? Boeing. Losing the battle of the X-planes may not mean losing the war to dominate the future of American air power.
CURTIS PEEBLES: So the last chapter in the JSF story is really yet to be written.
What was it like to be the only TV journalist allowed to cover the story from start to finish? How did he even get access? Go behind the scenes with the Battle of the X Planes producer, on NOVA's Website at PBS.org or American Online, Keyword PBS.
To order this show, or any other NOVA program, for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
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And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE (Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics): We're here today to announce the largest acquisition program in the history of the Department of Defense.
RADIO: Roger, copy that.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE: The Joint Strike Fighter.
CONTROL: Just for the record, pilot, yeah? You are my hero.
NARRATOR: In the skies over the Mojave Desert a battle of X-planes has begun.
CREW MEMBER: That looks good.
NARRATOR: Over the next year, two different planes will take to the skies again and again on a relentless quest to be crowned the fighter of the future, perhaps the last manned fighter the U.S. will ever build.
FRED KNOX (Chief Test Pilot, The Boeing Company): It smoothes out beautifully.
TOM MORGENFELD (Chief Test Pilot, Lockheed Martin): Woohoo! This is fun.
RICK REZABEK (Chief Engineer, Lockheed Martin): God, it looked so awesome.
TOM MORGENFELD: It felt great.
RICK REZABEK: We're going to fly the shit out of this airplane and just kick ass every day. That's what it's all about.
NARRATOR: It's all part of a top-secret competition, locking two of America's aerospace giants in a furious engineering dogfight to the death.
GRAHAM WARWICK (Writer, Flight International): You couldn't have a more interesting competition—two very different companies, two very different designs, conservative heavyweight against a radical newcomer.
DENNIS MUILENBURG (Engineer, The Boeing Company): We've got a hell of a smart team, so lets go figure out how to make it work.
RICK REZABEK: There's never any real time to relax.
SCOTT WINSHIP: Would I like to be farther ahead? Yes. Would I like to be further done? Yes.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE : I think we truly believe we've got the right vehicle for the customer.
WALT CANNON (Flight Test Engineer, The Boeing Company): It's starting to look like an airplane, that's what really neat about it.
ANDY BALOUGH (Boeing): I see our future contract.
WALT CANNON: Well, that, too.
NARRATOR: Not just any contract, but the most lucrative contract in military history, at least 200 billion dollars.
FRED KNOX: And we're flying.
NARRATOR: And the winner won't be just any fighter. It will need to land on a carrier, evade enemy radar, hover like a helicopter. But trying to build a fighter that can do all three, it's a tremendous challenge. It's not a natural thing for a jet airplane to do.
SCOTT WINSHIP (Engineer, Lockheed Martin): Come on, Simon.
NARRATOR: Experimental new designs come with their share of risks and failures. But now the U.S. military desperately wants a winner, claiming that aging fighters and shrinking budgets threaten to undermine its command of the skies.
Will a one-size-fits-all fighter, a Joint Strike Fighter, work for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines? Will it rescue them from the death spiral of defense costs?
With unprecedented access from the Department of Defense, NOVA's cameras take you into the U.S. military's most classified facilities from the beginning through repeated trial and error.
GERRY CLAUSIER: Talk to me. Do you want me to reset or slow?
ENGINEER: We're recommending we abort.
MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL HOUGH (Joint Strike Fighter Program Director, 1999-2001): The original design wasn't going to hack it.
MARK MAGNUSSEN: How much effort is ahead of us to make it work?
NARRATOR: Watch two teams struggle to get their daring ideas off the drawing board and into the air.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE: The Joint Strike Fighter will be the world's premiere strike platform. With the decision to proceed now made, it is now appropriate to announce the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter competition.
NARRATOR: In the end, only one winner takes all—in The Battle of the X-Planes, up next on NOVA.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality television.
Science: it's given us the framework to help make wireless communications clear. Sprint is proud to support NOVA.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
NARRATOR: Inside this bag is the future of American fighter power.
MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL HOUGH: There will probably never, ever be another program as complex as this, or as big as this when you start talking about dollars.
NARRATOR: It's called the Joint Strike Fighter Program. For five years the JSF has held a competition between two titans of aerospace to see who will build the next generation fighter. It's a prize worth up to 200 billion dollars, and the winner's name is in the bag.
JAY MILLER (Aviation Writer/Historian): The winner of the JSF competition is going to dominate the fighter aircraft market, not only here in the United States, but worldwide.
NARRATOR: Fasten your seatbelt and put up your tray table. NOVA and the Department of Defense have cleared you to enter places where cameras have never gone before, from secret installations to the cockpits of the latest experimental fighters. You've landed in the classified world of the X-planes—both hi-tech and handcrafted—where pilots fly into the unknown with just you by their side.
This is the battle to build the fighter of the 21st century. In the first strike in the war on terror, fighters are the front-line warriors. Navy fighters join squadrons from the Air Force and the Marines to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda positions in Afghanistan.
These aircraft play a key role in routing the enemy just as they did in the Gulf War in the early 1990s. In fact, some of the fighters are literally the same planes built in the '80s, designed in the '70s to fulfill Cold War objectives from the '60s. The most important weapon in America's arsenal is based on ideas almost a half-century old.
MICHAEL HOUGH: Our airplanes, they're wearing out. They're tired. Thirty year airplane's still a great airplane, serves its purposes well, but it's, it's old.
GRAHAM WARWICK: These aircraft, in the future battlefield they're going to be a bit like dinosaurs, not just in their sort of physical age, but their electronic capability. They may not be survivable.
REAR ADMIRAL CRAIG STEIDLE (Joint Strike Fighter Program Director, 1995-1997): We now have to go to higher altitude instead of lower altitude. We need to make ourselves as small as possible from a radar perspective. We have to do the same job, but the world has changed.
NARRATOR: Almost all of America's fighters will one day wind up here at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Old generals may fade away, but old fighters are cannibalized for parts.
The Air Force still relies on thousands of these, the venerable F-16, but the F-16 is past its prime. In the age of stealth, this fighter shows up on radar the size of a small flying house.
This is an F-18, the mainstay of the Navy, but Navy planes get old fast. The controlled crash known as a carrier landing and the rapid acceleration of a catapult launch will eventually create irreparable stress fractures and send them all here.
This is the subsonic AV-8 Harrier Jump Jet, flown by the Marines. While it remains the only successful vertical landing fighter, it dates back to the British invasion of America by the Beatles. Though later refined by McDonnell Douglas, by any measure the Harrier is ready for retirement.
The goal of the Joint Strike Fighter program is to replace all of these, the F-16, the F-18 and even the vertically landing Harrier.
MICHAEL HOUGH: It is an absolute vital necessity to have, not only a replacement airplane for the older airplanes, but to have an airplane that is a 21st century airplane to meet the needs for tomorrow.
NARRATOR: The plane for the 21st century, at least for the Air Force, would appear to be already here: the new F-22 Raptor, scheduled for deployment in 2005. The Raptor is the ultimate fighter, so stealthy its radar signature isn't much bigger than a bird. And it can fly at supersonic speeds longer than any other fighter, and that means it can strike deeply and invisibly at an opponent.
But the Raptor has a huge vulnerability that the JSF program must overcome: a giant price tag. Each plane costs about 100 million dollars.
BILL SWEETMAN (Aerospace Writer): The F-22 is a spectacular airplane. The problem is it's expensive. And that means the Air Force will never really have enough of them to attack the many and varied small and large targets that make up the modern battlefield.
NARRATOR: The F-22 is just the latest example of a trend that goes back decades. Each new generation of fighters costs more than the last, so fewer are purchased—ever more expensive fighters in ever decreasing numbers. In defense circles, that's known as the death spiral.
CURTIS PEEBLES (Aviation Writer/Historian): Where the death spiral could lead is the prediction that in the year 2054, the U.S. defense budget will only buy one airplane. So the Air Force uses the airplane in the morning, the Navy uses it in the evening, and the Marines, unfortunately, only get to use it every leap year on the extra day.
NARRATOR: So that is the JSF's mission impossible—to break the death spiral by coming up with a new fighter that costs a third of an F-22, replaces all of these, and meets the needs of the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines.
MICHAEL HOUGH: They absolutely said, "You'll never pull this off—impossible."
NARRATOR: In the past, the fiercely independent services would have fought for their own weapons programs. In the sixties, when the cost-cutting Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, forced the Navy and Air Force to use the same plane, the F-111, the joint program was a resounding flop. But these days, with smaller post-Cold-War budgets, the spreadsheet is mightier than the sword.
MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE MUELLNER (Joint Strike Force Program Director, 1993-1995): The Joint Strike Fighter program was a huge leap of faith for the services. The enabler, though, was they didn't have any choice. They knew that they had to modernize their fighter force structure, and the funds were not available to do that.
NARRATOR: With no other options, the effort to design the Joint Strike Fighter begins and almost immediately there's disagreement. The services can't even agree on the number of engines. The Navy's F-18 Hornet has two engines for safety. If one goes out, you don't have to ditch. But two engines are a deal-killer for the Marines because of their weight.
CRAIG STEIDLE: We cannot build, today, a two-engine, vertical short takeoff landing airplane. So the Navy wanted two engines, the Marine Corp had to have a single engine, and the Air Force wanted a single engine, because it was much more affordable and they don't have...they're not out over the ocean at night all by themselves like we are.
NARRATOR: The decision hinges on how dependable one engine can be.
RADIO VOICE: Steady state 255 started.
NARRATOR: After talking with jet manufacturers, the JSF team ramps up the specs for engine reliability. Rear Admiral Steidle convinces a reluctant Navy to go with just one.
CRAIG STEIDLE: That was another piece that was necessary to pull the program together, because without that we could not have a common production line.
GRAHAM WARWICK: I think the effort that's gone on here to create a joint requirement is astounding. And it's really...it's what's allowed the program to get where it is. And it will be what allows the program to continue, because if the services keep saying, "We all agree what we want, and we want this aircraft," then it will happen.
NARRATOR: Even with everyone on board, there's rough air ahead.
BILL SWEETMAN: We know how to build a stealth fighter. We know how to build a long-range agile fighter. We may even have a good way of building a fighter that can land and take off vertically. But trying to build a fighter that can do all three is very, very difficult.
NARRATOR: The Pentagon spent over three billion dollars in research to see if it was possible, and the answer? Sort of.
PAUL KAMINSKI (Department of Defense): The airplanes are not the same aircraft, but the building blocks are the same building blocks, for the most part: same engine, same major avionics. In fact, it's not important to have every piece...part...the same, but the expensive parts or modules...Through the life cycle of the aircraft there was the potential to save 60 billion dollars. And that's a lot of money in anybody's calculus, even in the Department of Defense.
NARRATOR: With the services in agreement about the requirements, the Joint Strike Fighter program launches a competition for innovative designs for the new affordable family of fighters. Like a high-stakes game show, only two contractors can make it to the final round and build test planes.
With billions on the line, U.S. defense contractors hold their breath as the Pentagon announces the two finalists for "Who Wants to Build the Next Generation Fighter?"
PERRY: These contractors are Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
NARRATOR: The announcement sends shockwaves through the aerospace industry, dealing a deathblow to one of the most respected names in aviation. McDonnell Douglas, a company with a fighter legacy that seemed to guarantee a spot in the final round, doesn't make the cut. The impact for the company and its employees is devastating. Within two years, McDonnell Douglas is sold to Boeing, one of the JSF winners.
A world leader in commercial jets, the Seattle-based company is seen as an unlikely contender in a fighter battle, for good reason. Boeing's last fighter was built in the 1930s—the P-26 Peashooter, a fighter from the age before jets, before even a closed cockpit.
PHIL CONDIT (Chief Executive Officer, The Boeing Company): Boeing hadn't built a fighter in a long time, and I think early on Boeing was considered, literally, a dark horse in this competition.
NARRATOR: But the Boeing acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the Navy's F-18 and the Marine's Harrier, makes a dark horse an even bet.
BILL SWEETMAN: By acquiring McDonnell Douglas, Boeing suddenly moves from becoming the least experienced JSF team to possibly the most experienced.
PHIL CONDIT: ...clearly leveled the playing field.
FRANK STATKUS (Program Manager, The Boeing Company): I'm in this job to win, and going back to...
NARRATOR: Boeing's JSF effort is lead by Frank Statkus, an engineer and thirty-year company man. When you shoulder the weight of a potential 200 billion-dollar contract, stress comes with the job.
FRANK STATKUS: A year ago I had hair, and it was dark. And now I have less of it, and it's a race to see what goes gray versus goes away.
NARRATOR: While Statkus runs the project, he isn't the creator of Boeing's design. These days with the complexity of fighters, no single person can claim that role.
JAY MILLER: State-of-the-art fighters, they're all designed now by computers, and it's, and it's...these are big teams of engineers who sit down, you know, and do these CAD/CAM drawings. It is very tough to find, you know, one person who can sit there and tell you that, "I designed that airplane."
NARRATOR: At the heart of the Boeing design for the JSF is a large delta, or triangular wing.
BILL SWEETMAN: It's an unusual approach, but the big advantages of that are that it's structurally simple and that it contains an enormous amount of fuel.
NARRATOR: Though there hasn't been an American fighter built with a delta wing since the '60s, the design has its advantages. The fastest jet ever to fly, the SR-71 Blackbird has a delta wing because it decreases drag at supersonic speeds. The Space shuttle is also built around one because it provides great lift.
But neither the Shuttle nor the SR-71 are exactly agile. A delta design pays a price in speed when executing turns, and the control surfaces near the tail don't have the leverage to turn the plane sharply.
European designers have overcome these handicaps in their new fighter, the Typhoon, by adding canards near the front of the plane. But in the U.S., delta fighters have been out of favor for decades, until the JSF picked the Boeing design as a finalist.
Why the new interest? Deltas can be cheap to build.
BILL SWEETMAN: Boeing took a step back and said "What makes airplanes expensive? How can we leave it out?" And they got a very, very simple design.
FRANK STATKUS: Boeing's expertise in wings has kind of taken a different tack. Our engineers have chosen to build this wing as one piece from tip to tip. We have always studied the idea of building a one-piece wing and attaching the fuselage to the wing. And so this time we had an opportunity to really try it.
NARRATOR: Boeing has taken to heart the JSF concept, meeting the needs of the Air Force, Navy and Marines through a versatile common design. And it even accommodates the biggest JSF challenge, landing like a Harrier.
While it gets a bad rap for safety, the Harrier is no doubt the most adaptable fighter ever built. Matching its capabilities will drive many of the design decisions of the competition.
When fully loaded with fuel and bombs, a Harrier takes off in as little as 500 feet, a third of that needed by most fighters. That short takeoff distance makes many roads into potential runways. After an attack, it returns, a lighter fighter ready to execute its trademark Buck Rogers move.
A Harrier hovers using rotating nozzles that direct engine exhaust downward. This mode of flight, called direct lift, demands an enormous amount of power, and it's dangerous. Before computer control, balancing a Harrier on its own engine thrust was like trying to sit on a geyser. Even today, its accident rate is four times that of a Navy Hornet.
But through their flexibility, Harriers have proven their value. In fact, in the Gulf War, Harriers flew more missions than any other kind of fighter. For the British, the Harrier remains essential. British aircraft carriers are smaller than their American counterparts. The Harrier's short takeoff ability overcomes the problem and creates a portable fighter force.
GRAHAM WARWICK: The Harrier has allowed the U.K., basically, to be where it couldn't be. The Falklands is a classic example. I mean, without the Harrier, we could not have defended the Falklands. We couldn't have got anybody...any aircraft down there. But the ability to put a reasonably competent combat aircraft onto a deck and get it down there, and then fight, was just the difference between success and failure.
NARRATOR: But the Harrier can't fly supersonic, a serious limitation in a modern fighter.
SIMON HARGREAVES (B.A.E. Test Pilot, Lockheed Martin): In terms of its turn performance, its range and endurance, and its maximum speed, whichever metric you want to look at, it fairs unfavorably with any modern airplane.
NARRATOR: The British search for a replacement Harrier brings them to the JSF table. They've become full partners. It's the first time a foreign government has been included in an American fighter development program.
The addition of the British only heightens what many consider the central technical challenge of the JSF competition, landing the fighter vertically. Alternatives to the Harrier's direct lift system have been studied by both contractors, but Boeing has come to a surprising conclusion.
FRANK STATKUS: Over the years, all contractors have looked at all of these various lift methods, and the least impact to the design always has been direct lift.
GRAHAM WARWICK: The Boeing lift system is basically the modern version of the Harrier, taking the engine thrust and putting it through a pair of nozzles that direct it downwards. The advantage that Boeing has is that you basically strap on the lift module around the engine. So the changes are pretty minimal.
NARRATOR: The fewer the changes between the Marine fighter and the other versions, the better the bottom line. Boeing has made an ally of affordability.
FRANK STATKUS: So, I believe when we're all finished doing a flight test, we'll have proven that direct lift offers the absolute greatest affordability because of the greatest commonality.
NARRATOR: While direct lift is affordable, other parts of the plane must pay a price. For balance during hover, the engine must be in the middle, and that leads to a gaping inlet to feed it air. To some, Boeing has designed a plane only its mother could love.
BILL SWEETMAN: It's a strange looking airplane. It's short. It's squat. The engine's in the front, not the back. It has this huge air inlet in front that reminds me of a hippopotamus.
GRAHAM WARWICK: This is a fighter competition not a beauty pageant, but there is an adage in aerospace that if it looks right, it flies right, and appearance may be a deciding factor.
NARRATOR: Appearance aside, Boeing's proposal is a cunning entry for the JSF competition. Throwing over fighter tradition, the company delivers a radical but simple design that promises to be cheap to build. Boeing's ready to give its aerospace opponent a flight to the finish.
DENNIS MUILENBURG (Engineer, The Boeing Company): When I daydream, I see it hovering; I see it taking off from airfields; I see it operating around a ship. And sometimes I even see it shooting down the Lockheed airplane.
NARRATOR: "Only in your dreams," is the likely response of Lockheed Martin, America's largest defense contractor. For decades, in this secret facility in California, the legendary Skunk Works, Lockheed has designed and built aircraft that have blown through the boundaries of imagination.
BILL SWEETMAN: The Lockheed's Skunk Works' reputation is founded on its ability to put together a small team of very motivated people, get everybody else out of the way, and leave them to solve a problem that everybody else thinks can't be solved.
RICK REZABEK: The whole history of this place has been, "There is nothing that we can't do, there is no project that we can't accomplish." There's a huge amount of pride, of, "We can do anything."
NARRATOR: By the time Lockheed earns its place in the final JSF competition, Chief Engineer Rick Rezabek and his team have already spent five years designing their fighter. Now they must build a pair of test planes in just two. If Lockheed wins, their work will live on for decades. If it loses...
RICK REZABEK: The stakes are horrendous on this. This program will end up running from today out through the year 2050, long after my retirement. The performance of this team and the decision making that goes on during these next two years are very key.
NARRATOR: The mystique of the Skunk Works remains unrivalled in aviation. It's the birthplace of America's first operational jet fighter, the P-80. In the '50s and '60s, this covert design house created the ultimate spy planes for the CIA: the high flying U-2 and the high velocity SR-71 Blackbird.
Later, for the Air Force, it built the F-117 Nighthawk, the first stealth fighter. Unveiled to the public during the Gulf War, the Nighthawk was the only U.S. aircraft to strike targets in downtown Baghdad. The image of anti-aircraft guns aimlessly blazing away at invisible attackers is a surreal salute to its success and that of the Skunk Works.
BILL SWEETMAN: They conducted many of their most advance programs in complete secrecy, such that nobody else in the world even had a clue what they were up to.
It's got to be very, very scary going up against those guys.
NARRATOR: The F-117 sacrifices speed and handling for stealth. It's been superseded by the current gold standard of American fighters, the F-22 Raptor, built by Lockheed. While very expensive and not the all-in-one fighter for the JSF, the Raptor provides a wealth of proven design ideas, including a radical new shape for stealth.
It's no surprise the Lockheed design for the JSF inherits the Raptor's contours. Built around one common airframe, Lockheed's proposed fighter is modified for each service. Most visibly the Navy model has a larger wing and tail for carrier landings.
The exterior design of Lockheed's fighter holds few surprises. On the surface, it looks like the company doesn't want to gamble. It's on the inside, for the Marines vertical-landing requirement, that Lockheed's bet the farm. The company's gone with a daring new propulsion system known as a lift fan.
RICK REZABEK: The lift fan has been an engineering challenge, because there has not been a lift fan built before.
NARRATOR: In the lift fan design, the engine sits in the usual fighter position in the tail. A drive shaft connects it to a large fan placed behind the pilot. To hover, engine exhaust is directed downward, but the fan is also engaged, taking in air from above the plane and blowing it out below. That creates two balanced sources of thrust, potentially a more powerful and stable arrangement than the Boeing solution. But to accomplish this feat, the drive shaft must be spun at an incredible rate.
RICK REZABEK: Think of taking the propulsion system in a Navy Destroyer, shrinking that down into a smaller package, putting it into a jet fighter airplane.
NARRATOR: It's a technological challenge in the tradition of the Skunk Works. If successful, the lift fan will be revolutionary, but on the drawing boards, it doesn't blow away its critics.
GRAHAM WARWICK: It's a very clever solution, but it's got gears and bearings and a lot of moving parts. And in an operational airplane, you've got to make sure they work 100 percent of the time. If you're a pilot hovering at 50 feet and one of those parts fails, it's going to spoil your day.
NARRATOR: Despite its complexity, the lift fan offers another benefit, invisible to the JSF's sensors and test equipment but plain to the naked eye: aesthetics.
RICK REZABEK: You can look at the Lockheed Martin airplane and say, that looks like what I would expect a modern, high performance, high capable jet fighter to look like. You look at the Boeing airplane and the general reaction is, "I don't get it."
NARRATOR: Lockheed will build its test planes the same way it's built its successful prototypes of the past, as hand-crafted machines, here in the Skunk Works.
This facility provides a well-worn path to winning the JSF competition. Lockheed will try to triumph through daring new technology, while Boeing tries to win with a bold cost-saving design combined with manufacturing know-how second to none.
GRAHAM WARWICK: You couldn't have a more interesting competition—two very different companies, two very different designs, a conservative heavyweight against a radical newcomer. If Lockheed wins, it continues its decades of fighter manufacturing. If Boeing wins, it could go on to dominate the fighter market like it dominates the airliner market.
SAM WILSON (Joint Strike Fighter Engineer, NASA): I think we will look back at this time, at this competition between Boeing and Lockheed, and I think it will be remembered as the great fighter war.
NARRATOR: The next battle of the fighter war will feature close combat. Less than a mile away from the Skunk Works is Boeing's top-secret complex, the Phantom Works.
In these two classified installations, the JSF competition is ready for takeoff. The schedule will be fierce by aerospace standards: in 24 months and on a budget of a billion dollars, each company must build and fly not one, but two experimental planes.
Adding to the tension, Boeing and Lockheed will remain in the dark about each other's progress. NOVA is among the select few cleared to enter both facilities, its footage locked away each night by security personnel.
Boeing may not have built a fighter since the 1930s, but from day one the company rolls out innovations to simplify the job. This scaffolding holds the parts as they arrive. The team uses lasers to position each component precisely in three-dimensional space without having to wait for surrounding pieces.
The parts themselves are designed so precisely that they fit together like puzzle pieces with hardly any adjustment. Techniques like this lead Boeing to claim it can reduce assembly costs by as much as 75 percent.
BILL SWEETMAN: It's a very interesting process, very new. Boeing's ability to demonstrate how the airplane is put together is certainly a plus, and that will weigh in their favor.
NARRATOR: The frame for the single massive delta wing, the heart of the Boeing design, is already in the works. But the skin that will cover it is being cooked up over a thousand miles away at Boeing's headquarters in Seattle.
Engineer George Bible has spent the last year experimenting with a revolutionary material for the surface of the wings. It's a resin and carbon fiber mix called "thermoplastic." In small quantities, it's been used on fighters before, but no one has ever tried to create anything as large as a 30-foot wing skin.
GEORGE BIBLE (Manufacturing Engineer, The Boeing Company): It's very challenging. We have no time or schedule to design something else, so we, we have to make it work the first shot.
NARRATOR: Thermoplastic wings will be lighter and more durable than conventional wings. There may even be other undiscovered benefits, according to another engineer who first experimented with the material in the '80s, Frank Statkus.
FRANK STATKUS: I personally would love to have thermoplastics on this airplane, because I know that there's value in the future. Even though I can't tell you in all the areas where we might find that value, I do know it's there.
NARRATOR: The future in a word: thermoplastics.
But right now, George Bible needs to solve some pressing problems. Making thermoplastic begins with these sheets of graphite, also known as carbon fiber, the same lightweight material used in fishing rods and tennis rackets. For the wing, it's laid down up to 90 layers deep on top of a giant metal mold or tool.
GEORGE BIBLE: We take layers of these graphite fibers and set them on top of each other, and then we put the resin in between to hold them together.
NARRATOR: After three weeks of lay-up, the wing skin is tightly wrapped in protective bags, ready for the next step, a massive oven called the autoclave. The huge chamber acts like a pressure cooker.
GEORGE BIBLE: The autoclave, for me, is always the most stressful part. You have nightmares at night thinking about all of the terrible things your autoclave could do to it.
NARRATOR: First, all oxygen will be removed to prevent a cataclysmic explosion. Then, with the wing heated to the melting point of lead, nitrogen will be pumped in, raising the pressure and exerting tons of force upon the thermoplastic, forcing the fibers to blend with the resin. In short, this is literally hell on earth.
For the next 30 hours, George Bible will hold his breath, until the cooked skin from the autoclave and a perfectly formed wing skin is revealed.
GEORGE BIBLE: Oh, she looks beautiful doesn't she? Looks good, looks very good.
NARRATOR: But this skin is only the first. Boeing will need three more, one for each side of its two delta-winged X-planes. And although Bible is elated at his success, he knows that the next skin, for the lower wing, will be far trickier. It involves a more complex curved shape.
And, in fact, when the next skin emerges from the autoclave, the first signs are ominous. Creases and folds on the surface hint at hidden structural flaws.
GEORGE BIBLE: Man, that does not look good, those wrinkles. I'm afraid we're dead in the water.
NARRATOR: An instrument scans the surface of the panel using water and sound waves to probe for air pockets that could fatally weaken the wing.
GEORGE BIBLE: When we have a gap in the plies, the sound will not transmit through there well.
NARRATOR: George Bible's worst fears are confirmed. The skin is riddled with defects.
GEORGE BIBLE: Right now I'm just, just exhausted. We can't get a break, I mean it's just downhill. So we'll have to do what we have to do to get a panel down to Palmdale as fast as we can.
NARRATOR: After hundreds of hours of work, the wing skin is worthless. With the first wing frame nearing completion down in Palmdale, Bible's team and its bold experiment are simply running out of time.
Lockheed is facing a crisis of its own. The problem that has brought its entire assembly program to a grinding halt hinges on the hold up of a single crucial part.
RICK REZABEK: We can have 99 percent of everything it takes to assemble the airplane, but if there's one part that hasn't been delivered yet, and it's buried somewhere in the middle of the aircraft, you have to wait on the assembly work until that actually shows up.
NARRATOR: Like Boeing, Lockheed engineers have tried to save money by reducing the number of parts needed to build the plane. One part in particular, bulkhead 270, has ended up especially complicated. It will join the front of the plane, including the cockpit, to the fuselage.
As a key piece holding the plane together, it's made of the metal alloy titanium. The combination of strength and lightness make it a natural choice for the bulkhead. But nobody at the Skunk Works had anticipated how hard it would be to carve such a complicated piece out of this super hard metal.
Machining the 300-pound Lockheed part means whittling away at a solid five-ton slab and the drills running 24 hours a day, using diamond bit saws and a special lubricant to reduce heat.
The pressure to get the Bulkhead done is enormous, but so is the price of any mistake.
DORIAN RACEY (Machinist, Lockheed Martin): If this part fails, it could almost ultimately be the end of our competition with Boeing in the JSF program. I mean it would really set us back.
NARRATOR: On top of the crisis on the shop floor, bad money management threatens to get Lockheed fired from the competition. In a program in large part about affordability, the company admits it's 100 million dollars over budget, Lockheed blames part of the overrun on a 30-million-dollar accounting error.
RICK BAKER (Vice President, Tactical Aircraft, Lockheed Martin): In essence what it was is...we were writing checks without going back into the check register is what it amounted to.
MICHAEL HOUGH: Lockheed, yes, had a problem in the subcontractor management business in their manufacturing end at Palmdale. It wasn't discovered until late, very unfortunate, very disappointing. And the lesson there is, "Take nothing for granted."
NARRATOR: It's a make or break point in the program. Under a powerful escape clause, the government can end the competition and award the fighter contract to Boeing. In the first real test of the military's commitment to fiscal limits, the JSF lets Lockheed off the hook. They're saved by the growing number of international customers now lining up to buy the Joint Strike Fighter.
MICHAEL HOUGH: We've got Canadians, we've got Italians, we've got Danes, we've got Dutch. We've got a little bit of everybody. It ensures that for tomorrow, in coalition warfare, we've got partners with the same capability to fight the same wars as we do.
NARRATOR: Ending the competition early would be a domestic and diplomatic debacle.
JAY MILLER: The government realizes that this program is so big, and so influential on a national, and in fact an international level, that their best bet is effectively to sweep this anomaly under the carpet. Let's forget about it, and let's move on, and let's work under the assumption that Lockheed has learned a lesson and they won't let this happen again.
MICHAEL HOUGH: Well, as disappointing as that was, the silver lining there is that we're doing business a lot, lot better and we'll continue for the future.
NARRATOR: In the end, Lockheed gets slapped on the wrist for bad budget controls and presses on with the program, nearly a year and a half behind schedule.
ED BEURER (Assembly Manager, Lockheed Martin): We can't let one minute go by without paying attention to something out on the floor and getting it done. We can't be slackers anymore.
NARRATOR: But back at Boeing, it's hardly been smooth sailing. The latest results from computer simulations are pointing to an alarming conclusion. Boeing's entire delta wing design may be fundamentally flawed.
The Navy has refined its requirements and wants a more maneuverable plane that can carry more weapons. Boeing's delta wing design is now seriously overweight. Months into building the test planes, Boeing's lead engineers conclude that the only way to lose the pounds is to abandon the delta and come up with a new wing and tail design.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: We are at a point in the process here where we need to make a decision on the tail. I think we're really struggling with which way to go.
NARRATOR: An engineering team led by Dennis Muilenburg must come up with a new tail design that will work on a reconfigured fighter. The conventional choice is called a four poster for its four control surfaces, the tail design for all modern U.S. fighters, including Lockheed's Raptor and its proposed JSF fighter.
But there is an experimental alternative, a novel two-post tail with just two angled control surfaces. The Pelikan tail is named after its inventor, an engineer inherited from McDonnell Douglas, Ralph Pelikan. He argues its merits.
RALPH PELIKAN (Engineer, The Boeing Company): Sure I understand you're all nervous about this new concept. I think it can be done.
NARRATOR: Proponents of the Pelikan tail argue that the design is less visible to enemy radar. In other words, it has a smaller stealth signature. For Boeing, this is an important plus, since Lockheed is the originator and acknowledged master of stealth technology.
FRED MAY: We can't afford to have any question at all over our signature and whether we leave a signature.
MARK MAGNUSSEN: I don't think that we really know enough about the Pelikan tail. We think we can make it work, but how much effort is ahead of us to make it work?
NARRATOR: Those supporting the traditional four post tail argue it's a known quantity. The word on the street is that the JSF program managers favor it for the same reason.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: There's a slight benefit, from a strategy standpoint, that we can negate a perceived Lockheed advantage by going to a four poster. On the other hand we end up looking like the follower with two teams that have the same design.
FRED MAY: I vote for the Pelikan tail. I think we've got to bite the bullet and go there.
RICK REZABEK: I guess maybe I'm still more conservative than Fred, and I would stick with the four poster and try and get the signature to work with the airplane with the four poster.
NARRATOR: The room is deeply divided. In the end, Muilenburg must break the tie.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: Now, I've been a four poster fan up until about an hour ago, all right? I think we can beat the pants off Lockheed when it comes to working weight, handling qualities and aerodynamics. Whether its real or not, they're perceived to have a signature advantage, so we need to do something to our configuration that will give us a signature advantage. I think the Pelikan tail does that. All right?
NARRATOR: Feeling pressure to make a bold choice, Muilenburg chooses the Pelikan tail.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: So we're going to go with the Pelikan tail. We've got some unknowns, we're nervous about some things, so lets go figure out how to make it work.
NARRATOR: But just days later, after Frank Statkus and senior management review the choices, Boeing changes its mind. Concerned about weight and performance, it commits to the more conservative four post tail.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: The four poster is a little safer way to go, so I was a little torn from a personal standpoint. But when we stood back and looked at the data, I think we made the right decision.
NARRATOR: Boeing radically changes the wing and tail design, which gives the proposed fighter a fresh new look. The new plane is projected to be 1,500 pounds lighter and more agile.
But it's too late to incorporate the design changes into Boeing's two test planes, now eight months into assembly. Instead, the company will submit the new configuration with its final proposal. By testing the new design in simulations and wind tunnels, and flight testing the old design, Boeing believes it can prove the soundness of its approach.
GRAHAM WARWICK: To those of us watching JSF from the outside, this is the first sign that all is not well with the Boeing design. Both designs are evolving as the requirements evolve, but it seems that Boeing's design is not as adaptable as Lockheed's. The requirements are still evolving, so there must be concern within the government that Boeing's design can keep up.
MICHAEL HOUGH: There was a lot to be made of the fact that their design's all screwed up, and they couldn't fly, and they couldn't do this, and they were behind and so forth—not the case at all. To me, it was just an improvement in their design according to the requirements. It was very normal, very, very normal.
NARRATOR: Whatever the future holds for the redesign, at least one of Boeing's nightmares is finally over. George Bible's team has finished the troublesome wing skins and is ready to rush them from Seattle to California. The last pair of panels is loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy, the largest cargo jet in the Air Force.
GEORGE BIBLE: Boy, I hope that wind doesn't tip our wing over.
NARRATOR: Bible scrapped the temperamental thermoplastic and cooked up the wing skins from a more conventional composite. Though heavier and less durable, the new wing coverings are finally on their way to Palmdale, still more or less on time and on budget.
FRANK STATKUS: And that's just what happens when you're reaching in technology, sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not.
GEORGE BIBLE: Emotionally, it will be over for me when I see that airplane disappear over the horizon heading south.
NARRATOR: With the wing skins safely in Palmdale, Boeing wastes little time attaching them to the wing box. But before the upper skin can be mated to the structure, critical wiring must be installed.
GEORGE BIBLE: Let's go terminate.
NARRATOR: A lone electrician crawls in between the skin and wing box to connect wiring. Working in the dark under the 700-pound wing skin is a grueling job.
GEORGE BIBLE: I'm going to need a heat gun.
NARRATOR: Hour after hour...
GEORGE BIBLE: Doing good.
NARRATOR: ...wire after wire, each connection is tested and doubled checked.
GEORGE BIBLE: How you doing, Lonnie?
LONNIE: Almost done.
GEORGE BIBLE: You're almost done? Yeah? How many connections you have to do?
LONNIE: Two.
ANDY BALOUGH: He's been in there for four and a half hours...has not come out yet. That's dedication. Now here he comes. Let's see if his legs are still moving.
GEORGE BIBLE: All right, Lonnie, my man. Oh...
NARRATOR: With the wiring done and the skin lowered into place, mechanics will spend the night hand-tightening thousands of fasteners.
Before the wing can be mated to the aircraft another major piece must first be attached to the fuselage. Like a giant gift, the entire front end of the airplane arrives in the Phantom Works hangar.
ANDY BALOUGH: I can't believe my eyes. We waited for all this time and we've finally got it. I can't wait to hook it up.
NARRATOR: The front end, which includes the cockpit with all its intricate electronics, was built in St. Louis, at a former McDonnell Douglas plant, now part of Boeing.
ANDY BALOUGH: Bring her back another three inches.
NARRATOR: But will this front end, built 1,800 miles away, mate up with the rest of the fuselage? The fit must be as precise as the width of a human hair.
CREW MEMBER 1: If we bring this down a little further we'll get the flushness a little better.
CREW MEMBER 2: Yeah. Both up together...bring it back just a little bit more. Bring it back about a half an inch and we're there.
CREW MEMBER 3: That's good, that's good.
NARRATOR: In less than two hours, the installation is complete, and the Boeing X-plane has its distinct face.
WALT CANNON: It's starting to look like an airplane, that's what's really neat about it.
ANDY BALOUGH: Oh no, I see our future contract.
WALT CANNON: Well, that too.
NARRATOR: With the precision fit of the wing, an apparition appears at the Phantom Works: the recognizable outline of the first of the Boeing X-planes. The company is now weeks ahead of schedule, and morale couldn't be higher.
MIKE BRUNER: It went great. It looks like an airplane now. Look at it. Lockheed, watch out!
NARRATOR: What Lockheed is watching out for is an end to its crippling parts delay. Mechanics finally install Bulkhead 270, which took five long months to carve out of titanium. Ed Beurer nervously waits to see if it will fit. If it does, a plane will quickly take shape around it. If it doesn't, it's game over for Lockheed.
Designed on the latest computers, cut with diamond tipped bits, only to be installed with a sandbag.
ED BEURER: That is a beautiful piece of job.
NARRATOR: In the race to complete its X-planes, Lockheed still trails Boeing by months, but the manufacturing team plans to fly full throttle to the finish.
RICK REZABEK: Basically this place is, you know, populated by a bunch of airplane nuts. So it's a very high pace, and that pace is not going to slacken up at all. It's going to continue.
NARRATOR: To underscore its commanding lead over Lockheed, Boeing stages a public relations coup at the Phantom Works. In a surprise move, Boeing has assembled both of its test planes for the media event.
FRANK STATKUS: Ladies and Gentlemen, the X-32A and the X-32B concept demonstrator aircrafts. What do you think?
NARRATOR: In an aerospace tradition called rollout, the company shows off its brainchild, in two different versions, to the world. It's a moment of high emotion for Boeing Program Manager Frank Statkus.
FRANK STATKUS: It's everything that we've done for the last three and a half years. It's all your successes, it's all your thoughts, it's all your weekend work, it's all your overtime. It's the soul that's in that airplane, because each and every one of us sweated bullets to put it there.
NARRATOR: Rollout is a milestone for the Boeing team. But as things stand now, Frank Statkus with wings would get in the air faster than the X-planes. They may have soul, but they don't yet have brains.
Hundreds of thousands of lines of vital software code is still under development, to manage every function of the X-planes. That work gets tested here in a multi-million dollar simulator. Boeing's lead test pilot Fred Knox puts the faux fighter through its paces.
FRED KNOX: How about we look at twenty knots crosswind? Just give it a little on the side.
NARRATOR: Modern fighters are designed to be aerodynamically unstable. Under computer control, that aerial volatility transforms into acrobatic agility.
FRED KNOX: Okay, now I have crosswinds. Roger that.
NARRATOR: Every simulated flight by Knox helps refine this essential software.
FRED KNOX: The flight control software, it controls the airplane, the way it flies, but it also turns on the air conditioner. It raises and lowers the landing gear. It navigates for us. It does every critical element, every critical safety element in the airplane. If we haven't done the development here the airplane will not fly.
Touchdown.
NARRATOR: But less than two months after rollout, the software development suddenly goes off line.
Boeing is crippled by the largest white-collar strike in American history. Seventeen thousand aerospace engineers are off the job, including more than a hundred developing the X-planes flight controls. Progress inside the Boeing Phantom Works grinds to nearly a halt, while outside, a small group of engineers joins the strike.
WALT CANNON: It's a bad situation for everybody. You know, everybody really has real mixed emotions, I think, and is real conflicted about it.
NARRATOR: Forty days later the strike ends, but Boeing doesn't escape unscathed.
FRANK STATKUS: The strike on our program is a terrible wound. We lost weeks of schedule. Those weeks will not be recovered.
NARRATOR: With the setbacks, Boeing's lead over Lockheed evaporates. After years of jousting back and forth, these two combatants are galloping toward the tournament grounds, toward the arena where X-planes and test pilots meet their fate.
It's time for this battle to take to the air. Just 30 miles away from the Skunk and Phantom Works lies the proving grounds for all of America's X-planes, Edwards Air Force Base.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE (Test Pilot, The Boeing Company): Edwards Air Force Base is a tremendous facility, and one of the hallmarks of that facility is the lakebed. It's about 12 miles wide, it's 20 miles long, and it's a very hard flat surface. And you can put the airplane down, and you don't have to worry about running out of runway because you've got the whole lakebed in front of you.
NARRATOR: With these wide-open spaces, Edwards and experimental planes go back to the first supersonic flights. Here the original X-plane, the X-1 flown by Chuck Yeager, broke the sound barrier over half a century ago. Since then, aviation triumphs and tragedies have made Edwards the hallowed ground of X-plane history.
Now these skies will hold an epic contest never seen before, a battle between X-planes.
JAY MILLER: Historically, we have 47 X-airplane programs. This is the first time in history, ever, that any two of those X-airplanes have competed against each other for a production contract. It's unprecedented.
NARRATOR: It's time for Boeing's dream to take flight, while Lockheed can only watch from the ground. After years of derision as a second rate contender, Boeing proves even an underdog like its X-32 can have its day.
FRED KNOX: This is Freddy Knox from The Boeing Company. We're getting ready to launch the X-32 on its first flight this morning, and I wonder if I could get a little forecast for the winds? Say from about 7:30 a.m.?
NARRATOR: Fred Knox, Boeing's Chief Test Pilot and a key developer of the X-plane, will take the craft on its maiden flight.
FRED KNOX: I appreciate your help this morning. Bye bye.
MIKE JORGENSEN: Good day to go?
FRED KNOX: It's an excellent day to go.
NARRATOR: With the fate of the Boeing effort resting on his shoulders, Knox receives a final blessing from Frank Statkus.
FRANK STATKUS: Have fun. We'll see you at the other end.
FRED KNOX: Absolutely.
For me, it's about as big a day as a test pilot is ever going to have, a chance to go do a first flight. It's a big day for me. It's a big day for the rest of the team. We've spent four years now, working very hard—everybody, from flight controls to A.P.U. pumps, to structure, a lot of hard work—and we should get a nice, safe flight in.
CREW MEMBER 4: Have a great flight.
FRED KNOX: It's a big day for all of us. See you guys at Edwards!
It couldn't be a nicer day.
FRANK STATKUS: I'm excited, I'm pumped. We're ready to go. Everybody's smiling. Look at that.
FRED KNOX: Looking sharp sir, F-8 forever you bet.
FRANK STATKUS: There's my team.
NARRATOR: If Fred Knox is nervous, he doesn't show it. Even after finding some stray tools in the cockpit.
FRANK STATKUS: Two of them.
FRED KNOX: Home, sweet home!
NARRATOR: Knox is alone in the plane, but he has plenty of company in the air. Two chase planes flown by other test pilots will monitor his flight.
BARB GLEICH (Mechanic, The Boeing Company): It's going to be exciting...finally. All of our life is in there, blood, sweat and tears.
NARRATOR: Like proud parents, the weary engineers and mechanics of the Phantom Works gather to see their fighter off.
FRED KNOX: Ready for takeoff on Runway 7. Be an airborne pickup from Salty Dog, and NASA 852 will be joining us.
CONTROL: Control copies. Read you loud and clear, and we are ready.
FRED KNOX: And I'm going to go flying.
NARRATOR: Today's flight isn't a round trip. The Boeing plane is leaving the Phantom Works for good to take up residence at Edwards Air Force Base, a short distance away.
CREW MEMBERS: Yes!
Woohoo!
Holy Christ!
WALT CANNON: I was bawling like a baby. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was excitement. I mean, mainly a huge sense of relief.
NARRATOR: Within minutes the X-plane is in the airspace over Edwards, wheels down, just in case. Knox has flown this plane for hundreds of hours in a simulator. Now he gets to see if the real thing handles the same way.
FRED KNOX: I'm happy with the plane.
NARRATOR: Then Boeing Test Pilot Dennis O'Donoghue, in his chase plane, spots a problem.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: This is Irish on the starboard side. You've got hydraulic fluid leaking from about the forward mid-fuselage.
FRED KNOX: I'm just guessing it's the first flight stuff going out a little bit, but uh, we'll watch it.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: It doesn't appear to be dissipating. I'll keep an eye on it.
FRED KNOX: Roger.
NARRATOR: With the source of the leak uncertain, Knox is told to cut short his long awaited flight.
FRED KNOX: We're just going to give you the abbreviated test points, and we'll set up for a landing here.
CONTROL: Congratulations, Fred. Well done.
FRED KNOX: Hey, we got airborne.
DENNIS MUILENBURG: There she is. Got one flight under her belt.
FRED KNOX: We dropped a little fluid out of it. We never lost...everything stayed up. It was full normal landing. The flying quality is about eleven.
O'Donoghue was getting nervous. He couldn't stand the fluid any more. Hey, so it was time to land, huh?
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Yeah, it was definitely time to land. The moment I saw it, it was time to land.
NARRATOR: The hydraulic leak turns out to be minor, a tiny glitch in an otherwise triumphant day.
Over Edwards, Boeing begins a series of test flights. During each one, the pilot puts the plane through a specific set of maneuvers known as test points. Sensors document the plane's flying characteristics. The results go to the JSF.
So far, the plane's performance closely mirrors the Boeing simulations, a sign of just how sophisticated computer design has become.
FRED KNOX: Every pilot has been astounded at how closely the airplane actually matches what we thought it would do, from air speeds and flying qualities and system performance. That's just been really a good surprise.
NARRATOR: While this version of the Boeing X-plane is intended for both the Air Force and Navy, it's the Navy requirements that will be the most demanding.
Commander Phil Yates, call sign Rowdy, is the official Navy Test Pilot assigned to the Boeing effort. For him, it was an unexpected honor.
COMMANDER PHIL "ROWDY" YATES (Test Pilot, U.S. Navy): I received a phone call: "How would you like to be the first Navy pilot to fly the JSF?" Well, after picking my chin up off the ground, I said, "Yeah, I think I'd like to do that."
NARRATOR: Carrier landings are a testament to the precision skill of Navy pilots, and Rowdy is one of the best.
In preparation for testing the Boeing X-plane, he takes an F-18 Hornet out for a spin.
ROWDY YATES: Okay, good nozzles, good hydraulic pressure, good RPMs. There's the salute, here we go.
And we're off, man.
Carrier landings are probably the most demanding task a pilot may be faced with, especially at night in adverse conditions—pitching deck, bad weather. You have to be able to precisely control the airplane.
NARRATOR: Flying at about 150 miles per hour, Navy pilots aim for a target zone of only 120 feet, about the size of a tennis court. They must catch one of four arresting cables.
Pilots don't apply brakes. In fact, at contact with the flight deck, they gun the engine to full power so that if the plane misses the cables there is enough thrust to get airborne.
ROWDY YATES: If landing on a runway is like threading a belt through a belt loop, landing on a carrier is like threading a needle.
NARRATOR: A test pilot's job is to jump into a plane in which he may have little experience and report on its pros and cons.
ROWDY YATES: When you start doing that in an airplane that's never been flown before, then it, it really is what gets a test pilot, I think, excited.
NARRATOR: What's exciting to a test pilot would be sheer terror to most people.
Here at Edwards, Rowdy will put Boeing's X-plane through the precision maneuvers of a carrier landing.
ROWDY YATES: We all recognize that these are unproven airplanes, but we, as test pilots, deal with that, that we're going to be able to handle any situation that the aircraft presents to us. If we don't feel that way, we wouldn't be flying.
NARRATOR: The Boeing team has worked hard to minimize the danger, but the test requires Rowdy to fly so close to the ground, any error or technical problem may be fatal. A section of runway has been marked off, equal to the landing strip on a carrier deck.
ROWDY YATES: God, IT goes.
CONTROL: Roger that, Phantom 3.
NARRATOR: From a control room miles away, a team of Boeing engineers monitors the X-plane's every move.
ROWDY YATES: The pilot learns what kind of corrections and control inputs he has to make, and then it's also the aircraft's ability to respond to those control inputs. It's that combination that ultimately determines how well the airplane is going to do at the ship.
NARRATOR: As he would on a real carrier, Rowdy receives visual cues from an optical landing aid called the Fresnel Lens. If he can line up an amber light called the meatball correctly, Rowdy knows he's approaching at a safe angle for a successful touchdown.
He gets additional tips from a landing signal officer on the ground. On a real carrier this officer would give a score to every landing.
Low start in the middle.
LIEUTENANT JOHN "GOAT" BROTEMARKLE (U.S. Navy): We're not really trying to grade the pilot on what Rowdy's doing. He's a skilled aviator who knows how to make the corrections...
Roger, Paul.
...so what were trying to look, is find out how the airplane is performing with certain deviations applied to it.
NARRATOR: With each attempt the degree of difficulty goes up. To recreate real-world conditions, Rowdy begins an approach descending too fast, or at too steep an angle, and then tries to correct for it.
ROWDY YATES: Man, that's amazing.
NARRATOR: The X in X-plane means experimental, but occasionally it means unexpected.
On one test flight, pilot Dennis O'Donoghue runs into trouble.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: We were just doing a routine test with the aircraft, to see if we ever lost the engine could we crank the engine back up and get it relit.
AIRPLANE COMPUTER VOICE: Caution.
NARRATOR: Suddenly a warning light comes on indicating the X-plane's landing brakes have failed.
AIRPLANE COMPUTER VOICE: Flight control.
CONTROL 1: Talk to him. Do you want to reset or stall?
CONTROL 2: He can't reset. He's got to bring it home.
CONTROL 1: Phantom 3? Control. We need you to R.T.B.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: R.T.B.? Can I reset?
CONTROL 1: Negative.
NARRATOR: Suspecting the warning light is at fault, O'Donoghue brings the plane in to land on the runway. Without brakes, he will quickly run out of room, risking injury to himself and his reputation. Wrecking a multi-million dollar X-plane doesn't look good on the resume.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: On touchdown, I press the brake pedals—no response. So it was just a matter of adding power and getting airborne again.
CONTROL 1: Phantom 3? Control. We need you to R.T.B.
NARRATOR: With the brakes definitely gone, it's time for Plan B: saving a 21st century plane using a two- million-year-old lakebed.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: I had plenty of lakebed in front of me. I touched down and just let the aircraft roll to a stop. Had we not had the lakebed, that would have been a much more critical emergency, much more critical.
NARRATOR: After a month of successful flights, Boeing's luck has run out. Repairing the brakes reveals a major software problem and the plane's grounded.
To make matters worse, Boeing no longer has the skies over Edwards to itself. That very day, Lockheed's X-plane is finally ready to leave its factory home and head into battle.
TOM MORGENFELD: Do the funky chicken here.
NARRATOR: The X-plane's first flight is in the hands of Chief Test Pilot Tom Morgenfeld. Having flown everything from the first Stealth fighter to black aircraft that are still classified, Morgenfeld has unrivaled experience.
Yet he is all too familiar with the dangers of flight test. In 1992, while piloting an Air Force prototype, a computer malfunction sends Morgenfeld's aircraft into a violent oscillation. After skidding in flames for more than a mile, Morgenfeld walks away unharmed.
Now, nearly a decade later, the legendary test pilot is about to climb into another untested fighter.
TOM MORGENFELD: No turning back now. I think I've committed myself, huh?
The first time you fly an airplane it's a tremendous thrill, your heart's pumping and the adrenaline is flowing, believe me.
NARRATOR: In a Lockheed tradition, Morgenfeld carries with him the wallets and car keys of Assembly Manager Ed Beurer and the rest of the senior X-plane team. It's a sign of confidence.
ED BEURER: Go, Tommy.
TOM MORGENFELD: We're airborne, gang, and it's flying great.
CONTROL: Roger, copy.
ED BEURER: I am so filled with emotion right now. Oh, man.
TOM MORGENFELD: Woohoo! This is fun. All complete, feels great.
Roger. Gear coming on my count. Three, two, one, now. And the doors are open. Smoothed out beautifully.
CONTROL: Roger. Copy that, Hat Trick.
NARRATOR: After 22 minutes the first flight is over. Lockheed's X-plane touches down at its new home.
CONTROL: Welcome to Edwards, and you're cleared for the shutdown.
TOM MORGENFELD: Roger that.
ED BEURER: That's a beautiful man up there right now, taking care of my baby.
TOM MORGENFELD: What an airplane! We did it man, we did it. What a thrill! Thank you, brother.
ED BEURER: Sorry. I had to hold you, I had to hold you.
TOM MORGENFELD: You set me up. Good job, man. Ah, Les. Good job, man. What an airplane, what an airplane! Magnificent! It felt great. It was super, yes. Thank you so much.
RICK REZABEK: God, it looked so awesome.
TOM MORGENFELD: Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Rick. I wish we had done a little bit more. I was waiting for it to just keep on flying. The airplane's ready, too. It feels great.
RICK REZABEK: We're going to fly the shit out of this airplane and just kick ass everyday. That's what it's all about.
NARRATOR: True to Rezabek's word, the Lockheed X-plane is back in the sky the very next day. A carefully orchestrated series of maneuvers slowly reveals this jet's true capabilities.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL PAUL "T.P." SMITH (JSF Chief Test Pilot, U.S. Air Force): "Baby steps" is a very good way to put it, very small analytical, incremental steps. We don't want go out and push the airplane or the pilot or the test team beyond their capabilities.
NARRATOR: Lieutenant Colonel Paul Smith, call sign T.P., is the JSF's chief test pilot, brought in from the Air Force and assigned to the Lockheed effort. Like all the pilots, he's spent hours in the simulator. But it didn't quite prepare him for the feel of the real thing.
T.P. SMITH: Probably the most incredible experience I felt was the enormous power behind me of the engine. I've never had this happen to me, but it's probably synonymous with being shot out of a fire hose. Just a very steady, incredible amount of acceleration, right through your back. And the feeling like this was a stallion that was ready to go anywhere, any place I wanted it to. And if I just let it go, it would go there.
NARRATOR: The Lockheed plane is like a stallion in another way as well. Like all fighters, when it comes to fuel, it eats like a horse. While not a JSF requirement, Lockheed wants to tank up its plane through aerial refueling. And to make up for lost time, Lockheed's ambitious test schedule depends on it.
T.P. SMITH: There was a lot of pressure to get the aerial fueling certification done so we could start tanking. The amount of time we could spend in the air before that was about 30 minutes, realistically, and that was just not enough time to get everything done that we need to get done.
NARRATOR: With only two flights in the X-plane under his belt, T.P. will attempt one of the most dangerous missions of the Lockheed program.
T.P. SMITH: Air-to-air tanking has always been kind of intimidating to me, because throughout my career I've been taught, "Don't let anything touch your airplane. Don't let another aircraft hit it, don't let ground fire hit it, don't let missiles hit it." And then the first thing you do is you go up to this tanker and the tanker hits you.
NARRATOR: At 20,000 feet, T.P. rendezvous with a KC-135, heavily loaded with fuel. The tanker slowly extends a boom toward a receptacle located behind the cockpit of the X-plane.
T.P. SMITH: It's really a basic feeling of trust between you and the guy flying the boom to make sure he doesn't hit the airplane where he's not supposed to.
NARRATOR: T.P. cautiously edges closer.
T.P. SMITH: At that point you just have to fly very stable because he's trying to plug that boom in the back of the aircraft.
NARRATOR: Running low on fuel with only minutes before having to abort, T.P. makes contact.
T.P. SMITH: You can actually feel it in the airplane. You feel like you're part of the tanker and it can actually fly you around. At that point, you just kind of relax or try to relax and stay in that same position while you download gas.
NARRATOR: X-plane and tanker are now coupled in tight formation at 350 miles per hour. Less than five minutes later, the crucial maneuver is over.
T.P. SMITH: This airplane flew tremendously well on the boom, better than any other airplane I've flown. And so it was very easy to get confident in yourself and confident in the airplane very quickly.
NARRATOR: For the competition, Lockheed designed its X-plane to use the Air Force system of aerial refueling, but Boeing's gone with the Navy's version.
With its software bugs fixed, Boeing's X-plane is back in the air.
Navy planes have a fuel probe designed to plug into a drogue basket at the end of a hose dangling from the tanker. But during Boeing's first refueling attempt, the basket flies dangerously close to instruments mounted on the nose. These test sensors are used only for evaluating the plane's performance, but if the basket breaks them off, they may be sucked into the engine. That could bring down the plane.
And that's not the only problem. When the refueling basket makes it onto the probe, it fails to seat properly, sending gas everywhere but the tank. In a blow to the Boeing effort, aerial refueling is ruled out as too dangerous.
JAY MILLER: I'm sure that Boeing's engineering staff was somewhat puzzled by all this. There was some serious study work done, there were a lot of engineering studies that were conducted, but converting that data to the full-scale finished artifact is often times a little bit of a magical process, and it doesn't always work out.
NARRATOR: For the remainder of flight testing, the Boeing X-plane gets its gas on the ground. And the company's month head start on Lockheed drips away.
JAY MILLER: Every time they have to land and refuel they're losing time. While they're doing that, Lockheed Martin is in the air and their completing all of their flight test objectives.
NARRATOR: For Lockheed, one goal has remained out of reach. In a month of test flights, its X-plane achieves mach 0.98, just short of breaking the sound barrier.
Like aerial refueling, the JSF doesn't require a demonstration of supersonic flight. But with only three more test flights of this version of their X-plane left, Lockheed wants to hear the boom.
RICK REZABEK: Today we're going to go supersonic for the first time. It's an emotional victory as much as anything else.
DICK BURTON (Flight Test Director, Lockheed Martin): People understand supersonic that work in this industry, and it's a very, very big thing. The crew has worked out here for, now, approaching 30 days, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and it's nice to give them a lift.
NARRATOR: The Lockheed X-plane team has struggled with a host of small but stubborn problems that have kept the plane subsonic. But at the end of a long day of flying, with test pilot Morganfeld at the controls, all that is forgotten when the Lockheed plane crosses the boundary originally shattered in the same skies by the very first X-plane.
Lighting the afterburner provides the extra push needed to go supersonic.
TOM MORGENFELD: Yeehaw. That was so amazing!
RICK REZABEK: It means a very successful end to a hugely successful first month of flying X-35s.
NARRATOR: Lockheed arrived late to flight test, but made up for it with a record-setting performance for an X-plane, 27 flights in 30 days.
A month later, Boeing's X-plane goes supersonic as well. The aircraft's grace in the air and strong test results have quieted the critics of its less than sleek shape.
Driven by the competition, each company has taken its X-plane to new levels of performance only to see its adversary do the same.
CURTIS PEEBLES: You had two aircraft prototypes and yet they were flying several times a day, and this is unheard of for X-planes. And it's a testament to both designs and both design teams that they were able to do this.
BILL SWEETMAN: Both teams set out to demonstrate a certain number of test points. They both seem to have done it. Both aircraft flew; they were pretty reliable. I don't think there's anything that's come out of this stage of the program that would say that one or the other is going to win.
JAY MILLER: That Boeing airplane is much more a competitor than anybody—and particularly Lockheed—really expected. I don't see any distinct advantage to either airplane. At this stage in the game, I'd have to tell you that it is neck and neck.
NARRATOR: Both Boeing and Lockheed realize the entire competition and the largest military contract ever, may come down to the JSF's final requirement, achieving the Harrier trick of landing vertically.
Houdini once made a five-ton elephant disappear. Lockheed plans an even greater feat: to levitate over three times that weight, a 17-ton fighter, using its radical new lift-fan. The fate of the competition and perhaps even the fate of the company rests on this untested system.
JAY MILLER: All of their eggs are in this one basket. If they do lose, effectively, Lockheed Martin as a fighter production entity in the United States, that will come to an end. They have nothing else to keep their front doors open.
NARRATOR: Lockheed engineers install their lift fan system into the X-plane, hopefully transforming it into that hybrid of the skies, a vertically landing jet.
While it remains unproven, the concept behind their unique lift-fan system exudes engineering elegance. Two columns of air, instead of one in the Harrier, balance the plane's descent. One column is the engine exhaust directed downward. The other column is created by a lift-fan connected to the engine by a drive shaft. The fan takes in air from above and blasts it out below. It's an ingenious system, but in practice it requires a symphony of moving parts.
BILL SWEETMAN: Lockheed has chosen a very complex solution. If something goes mechanically catastrophically wrong during the hover, you have very, very little time to get out.
NARRATOR: A former Royal Navy pilot with Harrier combat experience in the Falklands and Bosnia, Simon Hargreaves will attempt the first hover in the Lockheed X-plane. He's spent years in preparation. Still, there's no question he's about to take a ride on the wild side.
SIMON HARGREAVES: Nobody's ever tried to model a propulsion system that's quite as complex as this, as, quite as integrated as this, so there may be some areas there where the airplane doesn't respond exactly as I'm expecting.
NARRATOR: The vertical landing tests will start over a hover pit, ten feet deep and covered by a steel grate. The hover pit is designed to minimize the chance the engine will suck in its own hot exhaust. Hot gas ingestion is a familiar danger to Harrier pilots. If the exhaust used to float the plane somehow enters the engine's air intake, the engine will start to choke.
JAY MILLER: What happens when you ingest hot gas, your thrust decays; your thrust decays, you lose lift; you lose lift, you start descending at a rapid rate, and can lead to a catastrophic accident.
NARRATOR: Venting the hot gases out the side of the hover pit provides some protection.
SCOTT WINSHIP: Here we go. Seventy percent, throttle up. Come on, Simon. Come on, baby. Up the power.
NARRATOR: Hargreaves holds steady twenty feet in the air. At 35-thousand pounds, it's the heaviest fighter ever to hover.
CREW MEMBER 5: Wow.
NARRATOR: The lift fan performs without incident and produces 1,500 pounds more thrust than predicted.
SCOTT WINSHIP: That was great.
RICK REZABEK: That was incredible. Let's do that again. Incredible.
NARRATOR: After nearly two years of struggling to keep up with Boeing, the Lockheed team now has reason to display their usual abundance of self-confidence.
RICK REZABEK: We've never had a doubt in our minds at any point in this program that this is the right type of airplane and propulsion system. And we've felt very sorry for the competing team against us.
SCOTT WINSHIP: I never felt sorry for them.
RICK REZABEK: Yeah, that's true.
NARRATOR: While the lift fan works, Lockheed still hasn't accomplished the tricky mid-air maneuver called conversion, going from level flight to vertical landing, with its complicated dance of moving parts.
The same morning Lockheed lifts off, Boeing plans a dramatic demonstration of its own vertical lift system. The company's second X-plane has been flown across the country. The new proximity to Washington decision-makers and lobbyists doesn't hurt, but the real advantage is invisible.
The air at sea level has greater density than at the high altitude location of Edwards Air Force Base. Thicker air means better engine performance.
In this test of its direct lift system, Boeing hopes to outdo Lockheed. Test Pilot Dennis O'Donoghue will start in level flight, slow the plane down to nothing and hover. His slow speed will make the wings useless, and a failure of the lift system will mean the plane falls from the sky.
To give O'Donoghue a chance to eject, Boeing has conducted its early tests at higher altitudes gradually working lower and slower. Now, after 43 flights, Boeing is ready to go all the way, to attempt zero airspeed.
NANCYLEW O'DONOGHUE: I've got butterflies.
NARRATOR: O'Donoghue's family is among the spectators of today's historic event.
NANCYLEW O'DONOGHUE : The boys are really excited, too. I think Dennis slept because he knew he needed to. The boys slept. I didn't sleep a wink.
Look, Daddy's airplane. Yes.
NARRATOR: Two hundred feet above the runway, O'Donoghue slowly decelerates to zero airspeed and hovers. A 28,000-pound airplane hangs frozen in the sky.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Irish. It looks good here. Yeah, the hover performance looks real good, numbers were looking pretty nice.
CONTROL: And just for the record, pilot, yeah? You are my hero!
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Pretty cool, eh?
CONTROL: You got that right! Congratulations, Dennis.
ROWDY YATES: Oh my god, what a day. I'm sitting there yelling and clapping and crying, driving up, seeing it just right there.
NARRATOR: On this day the X-32B hovers four times—once for two and a half minutes—and, demonstrating rock solid control, performs a perfect 360-degree turn.
NANCYLEW O'DONOGHUE: That was just wonderful. Brendan said it was better than Star Wars, and for him, that's a lot.
NARRATOR: One month later, Boeing is ready to make history. If it works, the X-32 will become the first new fighter since the Harrier to transition from conventional flight to landing vertically.
For this risky mission, Boeing will also use a hover pit to reduce the chances of hot exhaust being ingested into the engine during the landing. To increase the margin of safety, Boeing engineers have removed some exterior parts to lighten the X-plane's weight.
Some critics will cry foul, but Boeing will respond that its new design, which it didn't have time to build but will submit to the JSF as its final proposal, is 1500 pounds lighter.
Dennis O'Donoghue is in the cockpit again, while flight test conductor Howard Gofus will closely monitor the mission from the ground.
HOWARD GOFUS (Flight Test Conductor, The Boeing Company): Now there's fewer unknowns. We know we can do it, we know we've been there, we know what we've seen so far, but we're still only one failure away from having a really bad day.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: Okay, coming up to fifty feet. Here we go.
NARRATOR: Closing in over the pit the Boeing X-plane comes to a stop and begins a slow descent. If disaster strikes, O'Donoghue is now too low to eject.
CONTROL: Tee-two, tee-two, watch tee-two. In hover. Caution, caution...
NARRATOR: Suddenly the controllers spot trouble.
AIRPLANE COMPUTER VOICE: Caution, caution.
NARRATOR: Invisibly. the engine has ingested hot gas from the lift nozzles and loses power.
CONTROL: Caution! Knock it off one!
NARRATOR: O'Donoghue feels the bottom dropping out, but it's too late to abort.
CONTROL: Howard we're coming down. Twenty feet!
NARRATOR: Twenty feet and only seconds from the ground the gas dissipates and the engine gains enough thrust to touch down safely.
CONTROL: Excellent landing.
HOWARD GOFUS: He's down on the ground and we realize it, and so there's the, you're in a quandary for that split second. Okay, we just did our first v.l. What happened?
NARRATOR: Over by the runway, no one is aware of the close call. Reviewing the data, the test team believes a choice made to increase safety, the hover pit, may be causing the problem. There's almost no crosswind to clear the pit of exhaust. Hot gas may be collecting and bouncing upward into the air.
They decide to attempt a second vertical landing but on a solid surface.
HOWARD GOFUS: We decided we were going to go for the vertical landing on the pad, so we set up all the numbers...set it all up and know that, hey, the same thing could happen there.
CONTROL: Looking good so far. Good one.
NARRATOR: The second vertical landing goes without a hitch, to everyone's enormous relief.
But just a week later, during another vertical landing, an old friend pays an unwelcome visit. It's a pop stall, the result of hot gas ingestion just above the ground, a common event in Harriers. Boeing engineers predicted it might happen and designed it out of their new version. But they decide to play it safe and stop testing their vertical system.
A month later, Boeing completes all major requirements for the Pentagon ahead of the competition.
HOWARD GOFUS: Hey, Frank, that's our man. Oh boy.
CREW MEMBER: Hey, Howard. Yes sir. We did it. Yes sir.
NARRATOR: It's a major landmark, and if anything has them worried the Boeing brass certainly doesn't show it.
FRANK STATKUS: I'm confident that we are AT the head of the class now, and I expect to stay there.
CREW MEMBER: All right, one more time. Yeah!
NARRATOR: The Lockheed plane now needs to prove it's ready for primetime by performing the critical transition from conventional flight to hover to landing vertically.
SIMON HARGREAVES: We need to demonstrate that we can land on a solid surface, both to make sure we've got the performance and the flying qualities to do that—to make sure that we've dealt with ground effects such as hot gas ingestion—and to prove that we can land on a normal sort of surface without damage or significant erosion to the surface.
Converting in three, two, one, now.
NARRATOR: At a thousand feet, Simon Hargreaves engages the lift fan and slows down. With air from the front and exhaust from the rear nozzle in balance, the Lockheed X-plane floats on nearly 40-thousand pounds of thrust.
This system avoids the problems of the Harrier and Boeing's direct lift. Cooler air from the lift fan creates an invisible barrier that prevents the engine from choking on its own hot gas.
After two minutes of hovering, Hargreaves eases off the throttle and gently guides the X-plane down.
SIMON HARGREAVES: That's beautiful, no problems at all.
CONTROL: Well done, Simon.
CREW MEMBER: Good job, Simon...honor
CREW MEMBER: Yeah, great Simon! Simon, looks like you've been doing that for twenty years.
SIMON HARGREAVES: It felt like it, yeah.
DICK BURTON: It's been a long time coming, and um, about the only thing I can say is yes!
SAM WILSON: It's going to be a tough choice, if one guy had stumbled here at the end then it would've made it easy.
ERIC DIDOMINICO (Joint Strike Fighter Program Office): It's not an easy choice and that's what the government wanted. The government wanted a close horse race, and I think they're going to get it now.
NARRATOR: In the waning days of the competition, at an undisclosed location somewhere near the Pentagon, JSF Director General Michael Hough takes NOVA inside a world where cameras have never been allowed. Behind a wall of security the secret proposals of Boeing and Lockheed are being evaluated by the government team that will help determine the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter program.
MICHAEL HOUGH: This is where the proposals are, all electronic of course. This is where we've got 200 people off and on coming in and looking at the proposals one at a time, gauging them against the operational requirements document.
NARRATOR: Digging through mountains of data, experts evaluate performance, cost, management and risk.
DAN NIELSON (Contracts Director, Joint Strike Fighter): Some of them are doing aerodynamic performance, figuring out: How fast will it go? What is the range? How will it turn? What kind of Gs can it sustain? Others are evaluating software and architecture.
NARRATOR: Now near the end of this jury process, the results are one of JSF's most closely guarded secrets.
MICHAEL HOUGH: We've got about six weeks left, by which we're going to take the results of our evaluation, give it to the Secretary of the Air Force who, in harmony with the Secretary of the Navy, is going to make a decision of who's going to build the airplane for the warfighter for the next forty years.
NARRATOR: As the final decision approaches, known in military speak as "down select," Boeing remains confident that its manufacturing know-how and cost saving designs have made it a winner.
DENNIS O'DONOGHUE: I think we all feel pretty good about going into down select, and I think we truly believe that we've got the right vehicle for the customer.
NARRATOR: But just before it crosses the finish line, Lockheed plans a final dramatic display, a bid for the history books and bait for the huge government contract.
In a test flight Lockheed dubs Mission X, its fighter takes off in less than 500 feet, then goes supersonic and lands vertically. Since the Harrier is subsonic, the maneuver is a milestone in aviation history and a direct hit on Boeing's need to strip off parts for vertical landing and reinstall them for supersonic flight.
But the Lockheed team pushes its luck too far. They attempt a vertical takeoff and transition to conventional flight. When the plane bobbles in the wind on liftoff the mission is aborted. But the failure does nothing to dampen Lockheed's legendary mix of technical ingenuity and engineering arrogance. This company believes it has won the right to build the first fighter of the 21st century.
RICK REZABEK: We did our part of the bargain, now the rest of it is up to the government.
NARRATOR: Five years after the battle began it's D-day. The decision is in the bag. The contractors anxiously await the news. In Palmdale, California, Rick Rezabek and a few hundred members of the Lockheed team gather in the X-plane hangar.
RICK REZABEK: We did as much as we needed to, to win this thing, and "we're" very, I don't know, very comfortably, anxiously nervous and confident.
SCOTT WINSHIP: We did the best we could.
RICK REZABEK: Yeah.
NARRATOR: While in an office in Seattle, the leaders of Boeing's X-plane program, Frank Statkus and company Vice Chairman Harry Stonecipher stand by for word.
HARRY STONECIPHER (Vice Chairman, The Boeing Company): Where are we going to be able to watch this thing from?
FRANK STATKUS: Right here.
HARRY STONECIPHER: Let's watch it.
EDWARD C. "PETE" ALDRIDGE: We are here today to announce the largest acquisition program in the history of the Department of Defense, the Joint Strike Fighter. The value of the program could be in excess of two hundred billion dollars.
Two contractor teams, one led by Lockheed Martin and the other led by Boeing, have just completed a concept development phase. Both contractor teams met or exceeded the performance objectives established for the aircraft.
DR. JAMES G. ROCHE (Secretary of the United States Air Force): The process involved, at the end...was about two hundred and fifty people. And both proposals were very good, both demo programs were very good. But on the basis of strengths, weaknesses and degrees of risk of the program, it is our conclusion, joined in by our colleagues in the United Kingdom, that the Lockheed Martin team is the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter program on the best value basis.
PHIL CONDIT: Frank, tell your team they did an unbelievably good job. I could not have asked for more.
NARRATOR: In a call from Washington, Boeing C.E.O. Phil Condit consoles his team.
FRANK STATKUS: Is it a winner-take-all, Phil?
PHIL CONDIT: At this point the answer is yes, that this decision they've held to is a winner-take-all.
HARRY STONECIPHER: You did a great job.
FRANK STATKUS: I'm sorry.
HARRY STONECIPHER: No, you did a great job. I don't know what we missed.
CURTIS PEEBLES: In my mind, the Boeing redesign, the hot gas ingestion, makes me wonder if, for Boeing to win, Lockheed's lift fan engine had to fail.
BILL SWEETMAN: One of the biggest deciding factors in this competition, in my opinion, was that Boeing never managed to make a vertical landing with the aircraft in complete configuration.
They took the inlet cowl off. They took the landing gear doors off. Lockheed Martin made complete vertical landings with the aircraft in the same trim that it could go to supersonic speed in.
NARRATOR: The X-35, now officially designated the F-35, may become the most widely deployed fighter ever produced.
JAY MILLER: I think it's ironic that Lockheed, in 1943, in effect, gave birth under the auspices of the Skunk Works, to the Lockheed P-80, which was the first successful operational jet fighter used by the U.S. military. And here it is almost sixty years later, and they are now the winner of the JSF competition, which could result in, potentially, the last manned jet fighter. It's the closing of a major chapter in the history of U.S. air power.
NARRATOR: With a buy-in from the services and billions in foreign sales, the future of the F-35 looks bright. But fasten your seat belts there may be turbulence ahead.
GRAHAM WARWICK: Now the fun really begins, because Lockheed has to deliver on its cost and performance promises for the JSF, and the government's already talking about cutting the number of airplanes it's going to buy and spending more on unmanned combat air vehicles.
NARRATOR: And who's one of the top builders of unmanned combat air vehicles? Boeing. Losing the battle of the X-planes may not mean losing the war to dominate the future of American air power.
CURTIS PEEBLES: So the last chapter in the JSF story is really yet to be written.
What was it like to be the only TV journalist allowed to cover the story from start to finish? How did he even get access? Go behind the scenes with the Battle of the X Planes producer, on NOVA's Website at PBS.org or American Online, Keyword PBS.
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