“We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of GOD to ever get them out to benefit humanity”
There is a video of him giving a speech where he says this as he is walking off the stage. I can no longer find that video.
I worked at the Skunkworks for 10 years. Ben also said we couldn't yet build hypersonic aircraft because they would need to be built of unobtainium. ?
Makes perfect sense. Even though we had begun using computers to keep track of parts, spares and other necessary things for larger scale manufacturing. The president's office (Kelly Johnson's and Ben Rich's) at the Skunkworks which we actually referred to as Advanced Development Projects or simply ADP had a large replica of a slide rule on the wall with a caption under it that read "ADP Computer"! Up until the F117A all engineering design was mostly done the old way.
You should see what the place I work has done for "engineering".
Ex: an error in a calculator was found where interpolations was done incorrectly in certain ranges on the charts. So, get the intern to update the software to where the calculator is completely disconnected from any physics principles, but the boss declared the update was tested (maybe software bug testing). (Luckily this calculator doesn't impact anything that might have deadly results)
Ex: in the name of consistency, efficiency and accuracy; increasing the documentation on a 5000$ piece of equipment as a 200k piece of equipment. Meaning, what COULD be presented in 5-10 pages now takes 50-500 pages of documentation. And the best part, the smooth brains involved cannot grasp why amplifying the required documentation as they did means that designs take more time.