Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Super interesting. Okay, remember back when we pressed pause on the Skunk Works story and moved up the state of California off the coast to Silicon Valley? We'd said that when Gary Powers and the U-2 was shut down in May 1960, supposedly, this was the end of US observational capabilities in the Soviet Union and that it was for about three months, but nobody do it. LMSC is the reason that we got our eyes back in the sky. You might know that eventually, after the U-2, Skunk Works would create the next great spy plane, the SR-71, which we will get to, but that wasn't for a little while. This intelligence gap was filled by this secret, not very well-known project. I think a lot of people in the military who did know about this stuff, this is heretical to say because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy. We were getting everything we needed from space, we just didn't want anybody to know about it. Everybody now's like, oh, the Blackbird, it's such a shame, the government shut it down. It was never used to its potential. Itf never needed to be because of LMSC and space.…

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