[b-mmxx]

This reminds me of the following:

“In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.”

Ben R Rich and Leo Janos. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”.

[m463]

My heart hurts reading that.

I felt something similar walking through Weird Stuff Warehouse and seeing old SGI workstations that I used to covet sitting on shelves for a pittance. Even if you bought them, you probably didn't have a 13w3 monitor or software to get them up. and now weird stuff is gone itself.

It's that "it's gone and can't come back" feeling.

[sitkack]

https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/...

When we look backwards in time, we see lots of tributaries that dried up for various reasons. That SGI workstation is still in your head, it is really up to us to copy and extend those concepts forwards in time.

That software is still sitting on a box of junk in someones basement somewhere, it just has to be found.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

That software is sitting in an SGI in my basement :-)

[m463]

That's a sad one too. it's hard to quantify the loss of an ecosystem.

[xtiansimon]

Old SGI workstations and the things people make with them....I loved the surplus you could buy in the Vally in the early 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPvIs0I-gmg

[dublin]

I don't understand this. I worked on the B-2 back in 1987-88, and two things about that program don't add up to having to reverse engineer anything.

First, the B-2 was the first large, complex product in history to be entirely developed digitally. Everything. was in CAD, and only the CAD geometry was authoritative. All drawings printed out were VERY clearly marked warning of this. IIRC, most of this was in Catia, so it should still be possible to read and use that data.

Second, if there's one thing Defense procurement Is good at, it's configuration management. This is doubly true of black programs like the B2, where not only do you want to make sure you never lose data or docs, but also that no bad guys ever have a way to get that data.

Either something went badly off the rails somewhere, or someone needs to rebuild something without the proper clearance. Otherwise, this makes no sense. BTW, the combo of the first complex CAD-only product multiplied by the hideous costs of any black program were largely responsible for the B-2's exorbitant costs.

Congress was stupid to cut B-2 production numbers, though, because the lion's share was fixed, sunk cost that remained the same regardless of whether one or a hundred airplanes were actually built.

(I think I've posted here before about how we spent many millions of dollars to develop a method to repair a major composite part in place. That part was pretty much what you started with when you put the airplane together, so even that was way cheaper than disassembling and reassembling the entire airplane!)

[Spooky23]

It’s risk reduction.

That was an innovative plane and the reality is that nobody is going to wake up and build it again once production stops. Once you break up a team, the team is gone — that’s why we always build submarines, even if unnecessary. You have to keep the people and plant working.

That tooling was going to be compromised and useful to the Soviets or some other adversary. There is a well established record of traitors selling plans or materials to the KGB/FSB/Chinese intelligence that have been caught. Also, from a PR perspective, a headline like “Air Force spends $50M/year to guard stealth bomber tooling untouched in 30 years” isn’t great either.

[double0jimb0]

This was talking about destroying the physical tooling. Ain’t nobody sneaking 60,000 tools out the back door to the Soviets. Many/most of those tools are going to weigh many tons, would require rigging to lift and flatbeds to move. Could they easily sneak out tooling drawings and schematics? yes probably could and did. But not the physical tools themselves.

[jn1234]

It was also keeping the manufacturing process and technologies, specifically stealth secret.

[ecpottinger]

The same was done the Canadian Avro Arrow plane, and the British Black Knight rocket. What happens once you join government, they take away your brains?

[neuronic]

The government doesn't have consistent communication between and even within departments, that's all really. There is no holistic understanding of things, it's just a conglomerate of BoundedContexts without good interfaces to talk to each other.

I mean if instead of discussing a topic freely on HN you were supposed to share your information using some I-1969 standard form with sections of one word answers, how many compelling and sensible posts would we usually see.

[ckozlowski]

F-14 as well. In all of those cases, it was decided that the cost to secure and account for the tooling to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands was more than they wanted to spend.

[eru]

How smart people behave depends a lot of context and incentives.

Many people are reasonable shrewd with their own money, and about stuff that directly impacts them. But people in charge of government organisations often have very different incentives and concerns.

(Other big organisations in the private sector can also go haywire. Especially when the threat from competition is low.)

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

[Naga]

The Avro Arrow being destroyed is a meme in Canada, but there's a lot of questions at least in the historical community on whether that was a blessing in disguise. The state of the art was rapidly moving away from bombers coming over the North Pole (which an interceptor like the Avro Arrow) which would have rendered a fleet of Arrows expensive and useless.

That being said, it destroyed a large part of the Canadian aeronautical industry since Avro ceased operations soon after and the well trained workforce was scattered to the States. There's a long history of Canadian governments doing shortsighted things like killing industries and then paying out of the nose to try to restart the industry every generation/ See shipbuilding in Canada and how Canada can't build ships for its own navy now, despite being one of the largest shipbuilders in the world in the early 20th century.

[monkeybutton]

With a globalized economy, does it make sense for every country to have a manufacturing base for every industry? Especially for a country with small/moderately sized population like Canada?

I agree though, the government has been short sighted and procurement of ships, planes has been a debacle for years. It seems that either way a lot of money is going to be burnt, either by propping up a non-competitive industry locally, or burnt buying something insanely expensive like F-35s from an ally.

[R0b0t1]

For critical defense needs, likely. If you can't meet those needs you are beholden to the people who can, and they may not have your best interests in mind.

[justin66]

The Avro Arrow and Black Knight were just prototypes whose movement into production could only be justified for nationalistic reasons. They did not have a proven track record or offer cost savings. They aren’t comparable to the blackbird at all, and destroying their tooling isn’t comparable either.

[Mauricebranagh]

I remember a trip from school in the late 70's to Cranfield university and they had a TSR2 airframe sitting sadly at the back of one of the hangers.

[rvba]

Probably someone was bribed by KGB to do it.

[throwanem]

Robert McNamara as a deep-cover KGB "illegal", there's an 80s espionage potboiler I'd love to read. I'm honestly a little surprised no one actually wrote it.

[mikmeh]

Reading the article I immediately thought of the blackbird and wondered if it had suffered a similar fate.

[alliao]

China didn't steal a copy did they? Ah got the dates wrong.

[booi]

That would be great because then you could just order the parts on Alibaba

[anigbrowl]

Pls

[slim]

s/China/URSS/

[stratosgear]

s/URSS/USSR/

[cpach]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/URSS

[HPsquared]

Ah, the famous opponent of OTAN...

[richrichardsson]

s/USSR/CCCP

I think this is why people like to refer to the Communinist Party of China (CPC [1]) as the CCP, because it evokes memories of the Soviet Union.

[1] cpc.people.com.cn

[lorenzhs]

s/CCCP/СССР/ - Latin C and Cyrillic С (and P/Р) are different unicode characters, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack ;)

[numpad0]

SSSR