Word: missilemen
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These two events would have been plenty for a single week. But in the accumulating momentum of missilery, U.S. missilemen fired successful test shots of Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic mis siles, got off a Polaris intermediate-range missile that traveled 1,100 miles, sent three Bomarc defensive missiles after fastmoving targets, and hit them (one Bomarc intercepted a supersonic Regulus II missile). And, only one week after an X-15 plane set a new speed record for piloted aircraft, the same X-15 climbed to an altitude of more than 131,000 ft., higher than any plane had ever...
...Force missilemen made a convincing display last week of a new missile that they have put together out of the parts and pieces of old projects. The mongrelized missile is aptly named Hound Dog. It has real bite. As the U.S.'s first effective plane-launched, jet-propelled air-to-ground missile, Hound Dog adds range and firepower to 1960's most potent operational weapon, the intercontinental B-52s of the Strategic Air Command...
...edge of space.*It plunked into the Atlantic 2,000 miles downrange, might have stretched three times that far had it not been weighed down with so much testing gear. The milestone shot cheered Titan's hard-pressed assembler, Martin Co. (TIME, Jan. 4), and Pentagon missilemen, who have bet heavily ($850 million in the fiscal 1961 budget alone) that highly touted Titan will go on the line next year as a more powerful and flexible ICBM than the 14-stage (single engine plus boosters) Atlas...
Pressure is only part of it. More and more missilemen suspect that the real problem is Martin's management. Critics point to a series of personnel shifts, con fusion and poor morale throughout the company. At times, the troubleshooters sent out from Baltimore only stepped on each other's toes, and compounded the trouble they were sent to fix. For some plant areas, everything operates by word of mouth. In others red tape is so thick that the head of a subdepartment must clear everything he does with his department chief. Martin's men at Cape Canaveral...
...piecing together radar and telemetry data, film sequences and fragments of wreckage dipped from the shallow waters off the cape, missilemen managed to figure out what went wrong: the loft. long fiber glass "nose fairing" that was supposed to protect the third stage and payload from air friction and buffeting in the upper atmosphere fell off prematurely, after 40 seconds instead of the programed 4½ minutes. Then the fierce drag of the atmosphere wrenched the payload-carrying third stage loose, made the second stage malfunction...