Kelly Johnson was fond of saying "If it looks pretty, it'll fly pretty." Ben Rich points out in his book "Skunk Works" that his career encompassed twenty seven aircraft while observing that a modern engineer will be lucky with one. He also points out that in order to get the go-ahead on OXCART (which he calls the SR-71 as OXCART hadn't been declassified yet) took Kelly Johnson, one guy at DS&T and two senators while there were over 2500 auditors on the B-2 project alone.

It was just a different world. Stakes were lower, costs were lower, innovation flowed like river water. Interestingly enough, though, in poking around the Web for this article, I decided to look back on the RQ-3.

So here's the thing. We've had two new fighters since I was a kid - the F-22 and the F-35. They're expensive, they're big, they're ridiculous. But we've had nine new UAVs since 1994, and that doesn't include off-the-books beasties like the RQ-170. That's just MQ-1 through MQ-9.

If I were an aero and astro guy, I'd be designing drones. Hell, I just started messing around with a Blade MSRX last week and I'm hooked.