Word: minuteman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...power. He places total megaton capability of U.S. missiles at 2,650. Goldwater assumes that all but about 50 of the SAC planes will have been phased out by the mid-'70s. From Pentagon announcements, furthermore, Goldwater researchers place the mid-'70s missile force at 1,000 Minuteman and 656 Polaris missiles, each capable of delivering a one-megaton payload. Deliverable capacity then would be 1,656 megatons from missiles, plus 1,200 megatons from the aging bombers-a reduction from...
...shell instead of paying $95 each for new ones. The Army decided it could get along with $1,200,000 less worth of insect repellent than it had ordered. The Air Force learned that it could safely stretch storage life of the solid propellant for its Minuteman missiles from three to our years, saving $25 million. Not even the old memento of service days, the dog tag, was safe. By ordering tags of corrosion-resistant steel instead of an alloy, McNamara shaved 1.60 from each one for a total saving of $97,000 on the year's supply...
...firm is their faith in the advantages of solids, four large rocket companies are putting millions of their own, dollars into development-a rare gamble in the Government-nurtured aerospace industry. In addition to Lockheed, Thiokol Chemical Corp., maker of the Minuteman booster, has put $12 million into a Georgia plant to build solid-propellant engines up to 21 ft. 8 in, in diameter with 3,000,000 Ibs. of thrust. Aerojet-General Corp., maker of the Navy's Polaris booster, is doing the same near Miami. The United Technology Center of United Aircraft is building smaller solids...
...while the U.S. would have only about half that number. This was the so-called "missile gap," which became a 1960 presidential campaign issue. To help plug the anticipated gap, the U.S. deployed 1,500-mile Thor and Jupiter missiles in Europe, then gambled heavily on Polaris and Minuteman. Since their solid fuel could be stored almost indefinitely inside the missiles, they could be fired more quickly and maintained more easily than the liquid-fueled, long-countdown Atlas and early Titan. They could also be built more cheaply...
...Effect. Schriever was so confident of Minuteman's feasibility that he saved a full year by ordering all three stages and all systems of a Minuteman fired as a unit on the first test-an unheard-of procedure in the normal piece-by-piece sequence of missile development. Reports an official Air Force history: "The results were sensational. All stages worked perfectly, the guidance system performed accurately, and the instrumented re-entry vehicle made a very near miss on a target some 4,000 miles downrange." Minuteman, in Schriever's view, has tipped the missile scales heavily...