Vanadium: A Green Metal Critical to Aerospace and Clean Energy

In the 1960s, the world’s leading aerospace engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works facility faced an extraordinarily difficult engineering challenge: how to design a successor to the U-2 spy aircraft, which had proven increasingly vulnerable to advanced Soviet anti-aircraft systems. Among other capabilities, the next-generation aircraft they were to design required an ability to cruise at a sustained speed of Mach 3+, operate at altitudes exceeding 80,000 feet, and feature as low a radar cross section as possible. Given the technologies of the day – slide rules were still used by engineers for most calculations – it was a daunting task.