Word: titanic
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...Force's Titan intercontinental ballistic missile, black-and-white-striped and tall as a ten-story building, boomed off the launching pad at Cape Canaveral last week, roared up 50 miles or so through a long-awaited break in the grey overcast, plopped its no tons into the warm Atlantic 300 miles downrange (maximum hoped-for range: 9,000 miles). The U.S.'s first successful firing of a second-generation ICBM (after Atlas) brought cheers from airmen and Titan's Martin Co. crew, weary from a two-month fight against the gremlins that unaccountably popped its umbilical...
...Though Titan's second stage in this shoot was only a water-ballasted dummy, the first stage's performance (300,000-lb. thrust, U.S.'s biggest) promised that the hard-base missile (TIME, Oct. 13) would be ready for defense operation next year. The bird's now-certain role: temporary plug in the missile gap between the deterrent power of the Strategic Air Command's manned bombers and the oncoming solid-fuel Navy Polaris and Air Force Minuteman...
...late nor too soon. Looking ahead to the mid-1960s, when Minuteman and Polaris will account for most of the U.S.'s deterrent-retaliatory power, Administration planners are convinced that it would be wildly wasteful to build in the meantime a huge force of obsolescence-doomed Atlases and Titans to replace SAC bombers. So the Administration is partially leapfrogging the Atlas-Titan generation. During the early 1960s the U.S. will continue to rely for much of its retaliatory power on SAC's manned bombers. Meanwhile, SAC will be kept updated, with B-58s and B-70s gradually replacing...
...Martin Co., $400.2 million, including piston-and jet-engined Navy patrol flying boats, the Titan ICBM and other missiles...
After making successful static tests, Cape Canaveral's Air Force missileers scheduled the first launching (limited range) of the U.S.'s newest "second generation" ICBM, the two-stage, 9,500-mile Titan (TIME, Oct. 13). But the big (90 ft., 110 tons) job never got off the ground: malfunction kicked in a "fail-safe" mechanism that automatically shut off the first-stage propulsion system seconds after it began to fire. Still, in the light of a fast-growing technology, backed by last week's huge achievements, the U.S. knew better than to condemn Titan on the strength...