Word: minuteman
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Last week, seconds after its engines spouted orange flame, a Minuteman rose out of the inferno of its underground "silo" at Cape Canaveral, passed through the preceding smoke ring caused by the shock waves of its blast, and roared out into the South Atlantic on a test run that was considered perfect...
Experimenting with new equipment on the Minuteman, the Air Force can reasonably expect some test failures in weeks to come. But Minuteman's progress to date is so encouraging that final-phase preparations are under way for the moment when it will become an operational part of the U.S. arsenal. Last week airmen and officers at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base were being trained to fire Minutemen. Slogging through knee-deep snow, workmen in Montana were well along on the project of digging 150 silo missile sites that will be scattered like giant gopher holes across...
...real purpose of Minuteman is to get a true numerical superiority in ICBMs," says Brigadier General Samuel Phillips, project boss of the missile and, at 40, the youngest officer of star rank in the three services. ''To achieve that we must keep actual production costs as low as possible, and we must keep operating costs equally...
Cheap Bird. Known in the Air Force as the "poor man's missile." the Minuteman is a bird of a different feather from the familiar Titan and Atlas intercontinental missiles. As "first generation" weapons, both the Titan and Atlas burn highly volatile liquid fuels that require a trouble-plagued network of pumps and pipes. Fueling and firing the Titan and Atlas is an intricate business-many experts doubt that they would ever get off the pad with just 15 minutes' warning. In contrast, the Minuteman burns a solid, rubberlike fuel developed by Thiokol Chemical Corp. Once the Minuteman...
Simple, compact and rugged, the Minuteman is 54 ft. tall, weighs 60,000 Ibs., which makes it about half the size of the Titan II. Liquid-fueled missiles are largely crafted by hand, but Boeing, prime contractor for the Minuteman, will treat the weapon much like a production-line item. Says Boeing's Chief Engineer Ernest ("Tex") Boullioun: "It will take us a year to install the first 150 in their silos, nine months for the next 150, six months for the next 150, and after that we expect to put 150 in every three months...