Word: schrievers
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Evasive Action. Despite the size of Schriever's task, there was nothing grand about his facilities when he was named commander of the obscurely titled Western Development Division and sent to Inglewood, Calif., in 1954. He set up shop in three buildings of a Roman Catholic parochial school that had been abandoned because they were not modern. The staff always wore civvies, shuttled in and out of a side door, lunched at a sidewalk hot-dog stand dubbed "the officers' club." Inglewood neighbors stared and wondered. "I never had to take so much evasive action," recalls Schriever...
...Schriever, the first few years seemed to hold nothing but pressure and frustration. Unknown to the public, U.S. radar snooping from Turkey and U-2 aircraft flying over Russia confirmed the fact that the U.S.S.R. was developing both IRBMs and ICBMs. Says Schriever: "They were well ahead of us with the IRBM, at least a year ahead in their ICBM program. A missile gap did exist." After the Sputnik launching in 1957, the thrust superiority of Soviet rocketry was obvious...
Lowest Apogee. U.S. missiles, meanwhile, mainly blew up or fizzled like soggy Roman candles. The first Thor simply fell off its pad. In its second test, it rose ten inches, collapsed. "It must have had the lowest apogee of any missile ever fired," recalls Schriever ruefully. The first Atlas flight in 1957 failed. At one point in 1959, five consecutive Atlas firings were flops...
...Schriever spent many hours rolled up in a blanket in a DC-7 shuttling to Washington to answer the complaints of congressional critics. But he kept insisting that Atlas would work, proved it by turning the first operational Atlas over to a Strategic Air Command crew late in 1959. Despite the anguish, those were exciting days. "Every damn firing was just like having a baby," Schriever says. "There was just as much emotional excitement for a success and just as much depression for a failure. Now shots are just good or bad. Missiles...
...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...