Still, while Lockheed Martin may look invincible now, it was not always so. Its rise has been fraught with disaster and catastrophe, even near-extinction, from which it ultimately became determined to insulate itself, free from the vicissitudes of the free market.

During Lockheed's dark days, its failures were so notorious they inspired Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, a 1974 concept album by Robert Calvert, the lead singer of the British prog rock band Hawkwind. Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, Hawkwind's bassist prior to founding Motörhead, also contributed to the LP, a send-up of the true story of West Germany's experiences with Lockheed's Starfighter jet, the F-104G.

Rejected by the American Air Force, Lockheed sold the Starfighters to the West German air force. Of the 916 jets sold to West Germany, 292 crashed, killing 116 pilots.

The opening track on Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is cumbersomely titled "Franz Joseph Strauss, Defence Minister, Reviews the Luftwaffe in 1958, Finding It Somewhat Lacking in Image Potential," done by Calvert in a crazed German accent, impersonating, in Monty Python manic style, the "Uber-Teutonic Defence Minister." But German officials were not laughing, and government investigations of the purchase ensued. Meanwhile, Lockheed also sold the Starfighter to the Japanese, with 54 of their F-104Gs also falling from the sky.

As a manufacturer of civilian airliners, Lockheed had foundered from the time its propeller-driven Constellation was grounded in 1946 by the Civilian Aeronautics Board after a series of crashes that year. It also discontinued its Electra turboprop commercial airliner two years after it was introduced in 1959 when three crashed in one year.

Its legendary Super Constellation -- a mainstay of American transatlantic commercial aviation from 1951 to 1955 -- faced competition in 1956 from the DC-7, the first aircraft capable of regularly flying non-stop in both directions across the North Atlantic. To keep up, Lockheed created the 1649 Starliner, but it was overtaken by the faster Bristol Britannia and then rendered obsolete by the jet-powered Boeing 707 and the Havilland Comet 4. Lockheed built only 44 Starliners and failed to recoup its investment on what proved to be its last propeller commercial aircraft.

To add insult to injury, the Navy, by now moving into jets, canceled a contract for the W2V-1, a military version of the Model 1649 designed to serve as an airborne early-warning craft. Not only were the 1649s unable to compete with new jets, their engines were "temperamental" by Lockheed's own admission. And while Lockheed was able to offset some of these losses by going into the missile business with the founding of Lockheed Missile Systems Division (later Lockheed Missiles and Space Company) and promoting its Polaris and Trident series -- which served as the company's cash cows during hard times -- its bad business decisions and overruns continued to threaten its profitability.

Finally shifting to jet aircraft, Lockheed still foundered. The company designed and built the JetStar, thinking it had a guaranteed market with the Air Force, which led Lockheed to believe that as many as three hundred of the aircraft would be ordered if Lockheed won the competition for the UCX, or "utility transport, experimental." In the event, the Air Force bought only 16 of the advanced aircraft, leaving a residual sense of "betrayal" in the company, as executives interviewed by Walter J. Boyne expressed in his corporate history of Lockheed, Beyond The Horizons.

As Boyne details, Lockheed fared no better in the commercial jet sweepstakes, precipitating a crisis that almost destroyed the company. By failing to acquire Douglas when it had an opportunity to do so, Lockheed allowed McDonnell to beat them to the punch in 1967, a lesson Lockheed management would not forget. Lockheed had hoped to allow Douglas to go under because of late deliveries of both its DC-8 and DC-9, and then pick it up at a cheap price, transforming Lockheed into a much larger and more powerful company than Boeing. Instead, Lockheed found itself in competition with McDonnell Douglas to fill the commercial jet niche between the Boeing 707 (and its counterpart, the DC-8) and the new 747. Its answer was the L-1011 TriStar.

Designed with three engines for non-stop transcontinental flights, Lockheed opted to go with Rolls-Royce for the engines because of Rolls' willingness to provide needed funding for development. Also, American Airlines appeared to favor the Rolls-Royce engine, and Lockheed assumed it would therefore be able to sell American the TriStar. But Franklin Kolk, American's chief engineer and father of the wide-body jet, favored a twin engine aircraft and, disappointed in Lockheed for not following his advice, pushed American to purchase DC-10s instead.

Dan Haughton, Lockheed's CEO, who had previously headed its nuclear missile division, frantically offered the L-1011 TriStar to Eastern and TWA at a drastically reduced price. But since there were Congressional rumblings about Lockheed using a foreign engine -- with dollars leaving America for Britain -- Haughton concocted a scheme to announce a sale of 50 L-1011s to Air Holdings in Britain to show that money would be coming into the United States to more than offset what was going out to Rolls-Royce. GE offered its engine to United Airlines at a favorable rate, assuming that Lockheed would switch from Rolls-Royce to win a United contract. But Lockheed refused to redesign the TriStar to accept the GE CF6 engine because of the $100 million cost of such a conversion. Haughton, believing he still had the American deal, was convinced United would fall in line and accept the RB 211 engine from Rolls-Royce. But United used its leverage to drive down the price of the competing engines and planes. Then it stabbed Lockheed in the back by going with the Douglas DC-10, announcing its intention to buy 60 with an option to buy 30 more.

With the deck stacked against it, Lockheed proceeded with the Rolls-Royce engine that, unexpectedly, then failed the standard test for "susceptibility to bird-strike damage." When three dead chickens were fired into one of the engines while it was in operation, it blew apart. Rolls was obliged to redesign the engine, producing one that was heavier and more costly and increasing the cost of the TriStar.

Competition from GE drove down the price of engines, causing Rolls-Royce to hemorrhage money. On February 4, 1971, it declared bankruptcy. Lockheed was thrown into turmoil. Having created a $50 million state-of-the-art facility to produce the L-1011s, it suspended production and laid off 4,000 employees. But Richard Nixon and Ted Heath, Britain's prime minister, joined forces to attempt to salvage Rolls-Royce and Lockheed.

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