Word: atlas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From Berkeley, Kennedy flew to California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, 250 miles to the south, for a personal inspection of the facilities that help make his optimism possible-U.S. retaliatory missile power. Standing on a coastal hill, he watched an Atlas missile soar out over the Pacific, learned later that it had sped 5,000 miles downrange, landing within a mile of its target. It was the first time that he had seen an ICBM fired. Then, in the relaxing atmosphere of California's Palm Springs area, where he was a weekend guest at Bing Crosby...
...Titan I, Aerojet-General, which built Titan II's engines; stored up dozens of new ideas for an advanced missile; instead of dribbling them into the Titan I, it saved them for a brand-new missile. Titan II is considerably bigger (102 ft. high) than Titan I or Atlas, has greater thrust (430,000 Ibs. v. the Atlas' 360,000 Ibs.) and has far fewer gadgets that can go wrong. Says Aerojet-General's A. L. Feldman, technical program manager: "We got rid of all the garbage. Titan II is the simplest, most elegant and most advanced...
Moment's Notice. What makes Titan II unique is a storable fuel that requires no lox (liquid oxygen) and enables the missile to be ready to fire at a moment's notice. Lox, which is used in the Atlas and Titan I, is cheap and an efficient oxidizer, but its extreme cold ( - 297°F.) and its eagerness to boil away make it troublesome and unreliable. Instead of this chemical bad actor, Titan II uses nitrogen tetroxide as an oxidizer and a mixture of hydrazine and UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) as fuel. Both are liquids that can be stored...
...when the Air Force would just be getting its RS-70s into operation, the U.S. will be protected by over 1,000 Atlas, Titan and Minuteman missiles, plus 650 Polaris missiles carried by submarines and more than 700 B-52s and B-58s. Without a single RS-70, said McNamara, U.S. retaliatory forces "would achieve practically complete destruction of the enemy target system-even after absorbing an initial nuclear attack...
Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., 37, flight director, controlled Friendship 7 from the moment the Atlas-D roared off the launch pad, had to make the heavy decisions about whether to let Glenn make a third orbit and when and where to bring him to earth if further trouble developed. Sitting in the Mercury Control Center, Kraft was fed a steady stream of monitored data about the condition of Glenn and the capsule, plus the prediction, cranked out by computers every 1½ sec. from Greenbelt, Md., of where Friendship 7 would land if the flight had to be aborted...