Skunk Works, And The Problem Of What Can Be Said

Around the same time she earned her engineering license, something happened at Lockheed that would define the next several decades of her professional life.

She joined a small, elite group of engineers working within a unit that became known, over time, by the nickname “Skunk Works.”

That nickname, borrowed from a running joke in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, attached itself to Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects unit — the team responsible for the company’s most advanced and most secret work.

The Skunk Works had been established during World War II to develop the P-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter, and it had continued operating as the home of Lockheed’s most ambitious and most sensitive projects.