[MUSIC] Talk about technological constraints, I want to start with this story of this aircraft. This was the U2, a, actually the A12, but this starts with the U2 aircraft. So in 1960, a CIA aircraft was a U2, was shot down over the Soviet Union. And the problem that this pointed out was that we needed a airplane that would fly higher and faster and be less visible to radar. So think of it at the time, in the 60s, there's this cold war going on. United States and Soviet Union were constantly spying on each other. they were constantly fighting these proxy battles. not out loud, but sort of through these kind of secretive things. And so again, the CIA really felt this high need to be able to spy on the Soviet Union. And if their planes were being shot down, you know, the U2 spycraft, which was the most technologically advanced up to that point. Then they needed to come up with something better. And so, the replacement, what's the replacement for it? Well, they needed something that would be high, able to fly higher, faster, that would be less visible to radar, right? Makes sense. So, when the specs came down, the specs were basically it had to be able to fly more than 2,000 miles per hour, four times faster than the U2. It'd fly over 90,000 feet, this was 20,000 feet higher than the U2 up to this point. And despite the fact this thing was 100 feet long and weighed over, likes I think it was like 62 tons, or something like that. It would have to have a far smaller radar cross section. So that way people wouldn't be able to see it, and even if they saw it they would go so fast they wouldn't be able to shoot it down. Think about this. It had to fly over four times faster 20,000 feet higher, and have a much smaller radar cross section. Like how is this even possible, how could this happen? Well if innovation was going to be tested this was certainly a situation to test it. For the designers in Lockheed this was their famed Skunk Works. And so basically what they would do is they have this organization that was outside of headquarters. It was sort of off by itself. In this organization they had, very few constraints if you think about. So first of all by being separate from the organization they didn't have the kind of organizational structure constraints we talked about. They had tons of money. I think they were pulling in just over 130 million dollars. That's a lot of money in 1960 to work on this way. they had very few organizational barriers. They had people running interference for them. They had, not the kind of social barriers that we talked to in social constraints we talked about last time. Because, what was, this was viewed as a positive thing. At least, in the, you know, US society, as a positive thing. And so none of these constraints were in place in the way that we had, have talked about up to this point. And so the question is, you know, they had been planned to launch in May 1961. And so what happened? The schedule was slipping, and costs were rising. Why was this thing not getting done? What was the barrier to innovation here? Well let me go into a little bit of detail on some of these barriers. Among the most significant problems that the designers face, and this is with, basically I'm going to talk about the constraints was heat, heat was a big one. The aircraft moving as fast Mac 3.2 was likely to reach temperatures about 500 degrees on average on the scale and up a 1000 degrees in places. There was no metal that was used aircraft design that was able to do that. they considered using stainless steel, but stainless steel is way too heavy and and so we could not do it. It could not withstand the stress. Eventually, they chose Titanium. And Titanium was a material that could be, with stand the heat and was thought to, it has half the weight of stainless steel, so it was actually a good material. However, Titanium is impossible to work with, nearly impossible anyway. You can't drill, it's excruciating to rivet it and to wield it. And also, they had settled upon one supplier of Titanium. Interesting, but that company could not supply the quantity and the quality, in, in the levels of quality that were needed for this aircraft. And so, as a result, they had, actually had this secret deal and they were buying Titanium from the Soviet Union. Isn't that ironic? They were buying Titanium from the Soviet Union to build this aircraft. Well that's the only place they could get this high quality metal that they needed. So here's a, a pciture of the A11, which, which became the A12 and this is the sketch on which they worked. So what are some more issues they had? Well there's an issue with the camera, so this is a spy plane so obviously it's going to have a spy camera on board. [UNKNOWN] looking up but its by camera. And so they had a big problem with the camera was that the it had to have a resolution of higher than any camera that had been up to that point. Remember that we have cameras like Kodak and the ones that we talked about before working on this problem. And as they come up with the expertise curve, their super expert at this and so they were working this problem. And they even found it hard but the problem was the difference the temperature difference between the outside of and the inside of the aircraft. was so high that you had this distortion, this thermal distortion that would happen. And this actually required to invent a new kind of quartz a new kind of material that they could actually use to withstand the temperature differences. And, and use it as a lens. Unfortunately, that material was really difficult to attach to the fuselage, so they couldn't figure out how to attach the quartz to the fuselage. So again all of these tremendous problems. The pilot inside the aircraft, the cockpit would be about 400 degrees, the cockpit was not insulated. How did they make that suitable for life? How can they sustain a, you know, pilot's life inside of that thing? Engines, let's talk about the engines for a second. The engines, each engine, there are two, had over 320,000 horse power. That's more, per engine more than the Queen Elizabeth II has in her engines. And so this would be the most powerful aircraft engine ever made. the problem was, is a huge materials problem. So they were going to have these turbins were going to have to you know, withstand these temperatures of 2000 degrees, it had not been done before. lubricating oils, hydraulic fluids, fuel. They needed 11,000 gallons of fuel and the fuel was going to get hot, right? Because we had these hot, high temperatures inside. so, in every way that you can think about this thing was problematic. The engines, for example, also had a problem with testing. They had to test the engines, they needed a massive amounts of electricity to test the engines, they would [UNKNOWN] them up into run the test equipment. So they had to do that at night, because the local grid in the city where they were developing this thing did not supply the power during the daytime for them to be able to perform the tests, for this. And so again, there were all these kinds of technical problems they had. When they finally got the airplane designed and built. They actually built it in one place and were testing in another. So they had to get it there. So what they did is they dismantled the plane, they took the big parts. And they put it on these big trucks that drove through, down the interstates of the freeways roads to get this to the place where the test field was. Well, turns out, that those roads, some of them were too tippy. So they had to re-level the roads. They had to cut down massive numbers of trees just to get this thing through. They had to close off the highways because, again, this was a secret recall. And so they had to get this thing somehow to the test site without people being able to see it. It started, they got there, they got it put back together, it started flying, first thing was it started shaking, uncontrollably. They had to land it. It turned out they had hooked up the systems wrong, so when they took it apart, they put it back together, the flight control systems were hooked up wrong. They brought it up again when they got it up in the air at this point. it got up to about 300 feet. And a bunch of tiles started falling off. So these Titanium tiles started falling off the aircraft. They had to land it quickly. It took them four days to find all the tiles and put them back in place. Talk about a project gone bad. Finally, they had the test flight, and it was, you know, in the words of one of the Lockheed people, this was the smoothest test flight ever. I can't imagine what one of the hardest ones would, would be. But it didn't fly has high or as fast, as long as they had hoped. They got it up, they got it flying, it got to about 400 miles per hour, and about 30,000 feet, and so this is fairly short. Remember it's going to go 2,000 miles an hour and, and 90,000 feet but it did filed in specification but nonetheless it flew and so the A12 is born. This is the Air Force version of the A12. This is trainer for it. And ultimately the A12 was mothballed. The plane that actually being serving in this role was the, for those of you know, was the SR71, the black bird. So these are the kinds of constraints we're going to call technological constraints. The have to do with the physical world and so here there are lots issues around getting the parts to to behave. Getting the matter to behave the way they wanted, these high temperatures, the high speeds, the friction, the thermal problems they had, getting power to the thing. We also had problems of time. They were trying to get it done in a certain amount of time and getting those things I've done in order or problematic in that way. And we're also going to talk about issues of the ecology life, keeping a personal life inside that of field. Like how do you do that? Like what is the effect of the environment on a big innovation like this. And so these are the three[UNKNOWN] that we're going to use to look at this problem of technological constraints. So we're going to start with physical constraints
