There in the conference room, Edward Lovick decided to speak up about an idea he had been considering for decades, “and that was how to ionize gas,” he says, referring to the scientific process by which the electrical charge of an atom is fundamentally changed. “I suggested that by adding the chemical compound cesium to the fuel, the exhaust would be ionized, likely masking it from radar. I had suggested cesium would be the best source of free electrons because, in the gaseous state, it would be the easiest to ionize.” If this complicated ionization worked—and Lovick believed it would—the results would be like putting a sponge in a can and running a hose into it. Instead of being bounced back, the radar return from the engines would be absorbed. “Bissell loved the idea,” says Lovick, adding that the suggestion was endorsed heartily by several of the customer’s consultants. An enthusiastic discussion ensued among the president’s science advisers, whom Lovick sensed had very little understanding of what it was he was proposing. In the end, the results would be up to Lovick to determine; later, his theory indeed proved correct. Those results remain a key component of stealth and are still classified as of 2011.
Lockheed kept the contract. Lovick got a huge Christmas bonus, and the A-12 got a code name, Oxcart. It was ironic, an oxcart being one of the slowest vehicles on Earth and the Oxcart being the fastest. On January 26, 1960, Bissell notified Johnson that the CIA was authorizing the delivery of twelve airplanes. The specs were laid out: Mach, 3.2 (2,064 knots, or .57 miles per second); range, 4,120 nautical miles; altitude, 84,500–97,600 feet. The aircraft was going to be five times faster than the U-2 and would fly a full three miles higher than the U-2. Skunk Works would move into production, and a facility needed to be readied for flight tests. There was only one place equipped to handle a spy plane that needed to be hidden from the world, including members of Congress, and that was Area 51.
It was January of 1960, and for the first time since the atomic bombs had shuttered the place, in the summer of 1957, Area 51 was back in business. Only this time, the CIA and the Air Force were comanaging an aircraft that was bigger, faster, and budgeted at nearly five times the cost of the U-2. The program would involve more than ten times as many people, and, as it had with the U-2, the CIA hired work crews from next door at the Nevada Test Site, men with top secret security clearances already in place. There were two immediate requirements for the new airplane: a much longer runway and a 1.32-million-gallon fuel farm. The construction of a new runway and the fuel farm began first. Millions of gallons of cement had to be hauled in, along with enough building materials to construct a small city. Trucking this kind of volume through the test site would draw too much attention to the project, so a new road was built, allowing access to Groom Lake from the north. Contractors worked under cover of night, resurfacing eighteen miles of highway through the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada, so fuel trucks carrying five hundred thousand gallons of specially modified fuel each month would not crack the roadbed with their heavy loads.
The A-12 Oxcart was a flying fuel tank. It held eleven thousand gallons, which made the tanks the largest portion of the airplane. The fuel had requirements the likes of which were previously unknown. During the refueling process, which would happen in the air, at lower altitudes and lower airspeeds, the temperature of the fuel would drop to ?90 degrees Fahrenheit. At Mach 3, it would heat up to 285 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which conventional fuels boil and explode. To allow for this kind of fluctuation, JP-7 was designed to maintain such a low vapor pressure that a person could not light it with a match. This made for many practical jokes, with those in the know dropping lit matches into a barrel of JP-7 to make those not in the know duck and run for cover. It also required extreme precision of the man who was chosen to be in charge of the fuels team, Air Force sergeant Harry Martin.
This meant Martin was one of the first men to return to the nearly deserted secret base. “Winters were freezing on Groom Lake,” Martin recalls, with temperatures dropping into the low teens. “I lived in a dilapidated trailer heated with kerosene. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I did that first winter at Area 51.” Martin had no idea what he was working on but gathered it was important when he was woken up in the middle of the night by a two-star general. “He said we had an important task. I thought to myself, ‘If a general is up working at this hour, then I’m up too.’ Working at Area 51 was the highlight of my career.”
The A-12 was original in every way, meaning it had unforeseen needs that came up at every turn. The eighty-five-hundred-foot runway had to be created piece by piece because the standard Air Force runways would not work when it came to Oxcart. The longitudinal sections had to be made much larger, and the joints holding them together needed to run parallel to the aircraft’s roll, not horizontal, as was standard with Air Force planes. Large, new aircraft hangars went into construction, ready to conceal what would become known as the CIA’s “own little air force.” Getting the Oxcart to fly would involve its own small fleet of aircraft: F-104 chase planes, proficiency-training airplanes, transport planes, and a helicopter for search and rescue.