Martin Marietta: Titan Missiles, Driveway Sealant and a Pac-Man Defense

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Martin Marietta was born in 1961 from the merger of the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore, builder of the Titan ICBM for the Air Force, and the American Marietta Corporation of Chicago, which made paints, dyes, cement and driveway sealant. The pairing was a hedge: construction materials sold steadily while defense contracts rose and fell with Pentagon budgets. The engineering output was wide. In 1963 the company built the MH-1A, a floating nuclear power plant on the barge Sturgis for the Army Nuclear Power Program. It developed the Titan I through IV rockets, built the Mark IV monorail commissioned in 1969 for Walt Disney World, which ran from 1971 to 1989, and produced the Viking 1 and 2 landers that sent back images from Mars. In 1971 it lost Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., in which the Supreme Court unanimously struck down its policy of refusing to hire women, but not men, with preschool-age children.

In 1982 Bendix, led by William Agee, bought a majority of Martin Marietta's shares through a tender offer. During the waiting period before Bendix could replace the board, CEO Thomas G. Pownall sold assets, borrowed billions and launched a counter tender offer for Bendix itself, the Pac-Man defense. The standoff ended when Allied Corporation bought Bendix, leaving Martin Marietta independent but heavily indebted. After the Cold War, Norman Augustine and other defense chiefs attended a July 1993 dinner with Les Aspin and William Perry, who told them to consolidate. Martin Marietta bought GE Aerospace for $3 billion and General Dynamics' space systems division, spun off Martin Marietta Materials, and in 1995 merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin.

• The Disney monorail was approached as an aerospace systems project, using aircraft-grade aluminum and fail-safe redundancy.
• Holding Bendix shares meant Pownall could, in theory, vote to remove Agee while Agee tried to remove him.
• Augustine named the 1993 meeting with Pentagon leaders the Last Supper.
• Buying GE Aerospace let the company offer the Pentagon both the Titan launch vehicle and the satellite on top of it.
• The company also took over the management contract for Sandia National Laboratories during its 1990s buying spree.