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Operating on the Jones philosophy, Northrop had to make some harsh choices. It scrapped a program to build a costly Mach 3 interceptor, elected instead to develop a bargain-basement ($550,000) jet trainer. "Some people thought we were damned fools, because the Air Force was planning to buy 500 of these interceptors at $5,000,000 apiece," recalls Jones. "But it was clear to me that there were some tough decisions ahead that the Defense Department hadn't owned up to. With money being poured into long-range missiles, a program for a long-range fighter-interceptor looked like a first-class candidate for cancellation."
Before long, the Pentagon proved Jones right by scrubbing the fighter-interceptor program. By contrast, Northrop's backlog for its supersonic T-38 Talon trainer now stands at $101 million.
Jones chose to regard Northrop not as a collection of product lines but as a storehouse of skills. Though its F89 and Snark rapidly became obsolete, Northrop, in building them, had become expert in the fields of guidance, communications, fire control and optics. Tom Jones, steadily moving up through the Northrop hierarchy, recommended sweeping changes to exploit the company's spectrum of esoteric knowledge. By the time he took over the presidency from Collins in 1959, Northrop had become subcontractor to the whole space age, had even erased the word "Aircraft" from its corporate title. "It made much more sense," says Jones, "to group ourselves around our special skills, and thus to take advantage of the technological fallout that followed."
Bailing Out Astronauts. Most fruitful fallout came from the Snark. A refinement of the Snark's star-tracking guidance system now helps to guide the Polaris-firing submarines and the Air Force's air-to-ground Skybolt missile; it will also ride on the Project Ranger moon shoot and the Project Mariner probes to Mercury and Venus. "Ultimately," says Jones, "the same technology will serve on long-distance airliners and ocean liners." Work on the Snark also convinced Jones of the need for a pulse-taking computer to run a continuous inspection on every missile. From that experience Northrop developed its intelligent Datico, which checks out not only the Polaris but half a dozen Army missiles as well as the flight-control and radar-identification systems on Air Force planes.
From planes, Northrop made a short jump into recoverable Mach 2 target missiles for ack-ack training. The target drones, of which Northrop is the world's largest builder, float down to earth on parachutes after the shoot is finished—and they gave Northrop expertise in high-altitude landing systems. The eventual result: the Northrop-built recovery system for the Mercury capsule, including its 63-ft.-wide parachute, which brought Astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom down from space.