Very early in the CORONA flight programme, perhaps just before Discoverer Ⅳ or Ⅴ was about to fly in the summer of 1959, Jim Plummer was sitting in his office in the Skunk Works in Menlo Park. This was the Skunk Works that nobody has ever really heard of. It was not the famous Lockheed Skunk Works that built the U-2 spyplane and the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 stealth fighter. It was Lockheed's other Skunk Works, the top secret CORONA integration facility south of San Francisco, in the rundown city of East Palo Alto, in the neighbourhood of Menlo Park. This Skunk Works was located in a building next to a helicopter factory. Plummer was in his office early on a Saturday morning when he got a call from a senior Air Force officer. "Jim, can you still take on a job for Lockheed without telling a soul?" the officer asked.
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