My grandfather was an OG at the Skunk Works from the time where it was first established. He started at the Burbank plant and followed to Palmdale. He worked on

My grandfather was an OG at the Skunk Works from the time where it was first established. He started at the Burbank plant and followed to Palmdale. He worked on a lot of those legendary projects and still has a ton of his old illustrations. This was a question of mine too - why was there so much innovation at such breakneck speed and why have things changed? His feeling is that it was a cultural one. In the early days of the Skunk Works, people felt and operated like it was the most secretive and important element of their lives and had a tremendous amount of pride for their work. He said that over time it began to operate less and less like a sidecar "elite unit" of engineering etc... and started to get integrated more into the rest of Lockheed. Then the culture began to fell apart because the bar was not as high.