Word: snarking
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Nipped by the Snark. Like many another airframe company, Northrop had been started on a shoestring by a self-schooled plane designer, and was in danger of ending on one. A veteran of Douglas and Lockheed, John Knudsen Northrop had designed the Lockheed Vega used by Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart, and in 1939 he set up his own company. World War II made it big-the Northrop-designed P-61 Black Widow gained fame as the first genuine night fighter, and Northrop rolled them out in droves. Peacetime threatened to kill the company...
...budget-whacking day in 1949, the Air Force cut off $90 million worth of Northrop orders. By the time Tom Jones came on the scene, Northrop had only two projects of size, both precariously experimental: the F89 fighter and the winged Snark, the nation's first intercontinental missile, which was exploding so regularly that birdmen joked wryly about "the Snark-infested waters off Cape Canaveral." Time and again, Air Force procurement officers threatened to cancel the Snark if it failed just once more, and to scrap the F89 if it turned up just one more...
Jones chose to regard Northrop not as a collection of product lines but as a storehouse of skills. Though its F89 and Snark rapidly became obsolete, Northrop, in building them, had become expert in the fields of guidance, communications, fire control and optics. Tom Jones, steadily moving up through the Northrop hierarchy, recommended sweeping changes to exploit the company's spectrum of esoteric knowledge. By the time he took over the presidency from Collins in 1959, Northrop had become subcontractor to the whole space age, had even erased the word "Aircraft" from its corporate title. "It made much more...
Bailing Out Astronauts. Most fruitful fallout came from the Snark. A refinement of the Snark's star-tracking guidance system now helps to guide the Polaris-firing submarines and the Air Force's air-to-ground Skybolt missile; it will also ride on the Project Ranger moon shoot and the Project Mariner probes to Mercury and Venus. "Ultimately," says Jones, "the same technology will serve on long-distance airliners and ocean liners." Work on the Snark also convinced Jones of the need for a pulse-taking computer to run a continuous inspection on every missile. From that experience...
...President gets credit for new doctrine, McNamara will catch most of the blame for drastic cuts he has ordered in existing programs. Among them: curtailment of the liquid-fueled, obsolescent Titan ICBM and "low reliability" Snark missiles and a virtual end to the development of the Air Force's cherished Mach 3 bomber of the future, North American's B-70, as well as the perennially experimental nuclear airplane. These slashes are sure to bring cries of anguish from pressure groups (both in and out of the Pentagon) and contractors, but none will be so loud or perhaps...