Word: titanics
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Chairman George M. Bunker of the Martin Co. announced last week that he would take personal charge of the company's Titan ICBM program and revamp the whole operation. All missile production, testing and launching will be brought into a new division, with headquarters shifted from Baltimore to Denver, where Martin produces the Titan. Denver's current boss, Howard W. ("Bucky") Merrill, will stay on as a Martin vice president, but relinquish top operational control of the Titan program to Bunker, who is moving to Denver...
...Bunker's action came none too soon. The Titan, on which the U.S. has spent some $1.2 billion to date, is in trouble. After four preliminary successful shoots (none beyond the first stage), the missile designed to be more sophisticated than Convair's Atlas has not been able to get off the pad for seven months...
While the number of Titans built is secret, best guess is that 35 have come off the lines, of which five have been lost in accidents; another nine have been damaged, and of the nine, only two of the birds could be put back into flight condition. The accidents did not stem from any basic flaw in design. Most of the troubles came from unrelated, random-type failures that plague every missile, including the Atlas, which failed five times in a row earlier this year before the bugs were taken out. The big problem is that Martin...
...resort it is. Last week the House Armed Services Committee revealed that a lot of the high brass have been relaxing on the Cotton Bay Club's palm-fringed golf course as freeloading guests of Baltimore's Martin Co.. manufacturers of military aircraft and missiles (Vanguard, Titan, Mace). In the past three years no fewer than 25 top-ranking Navy and Air Force officers vacationed on Eleuthera at Martin's expense...
Minuteman. Most promising solid-fuel rocket is the Minuteman, the Air Force's long-range (6,300 miles) missile. Not much has been revealed officially, but an air of success hangs around men who are working on it. Much smaller than its rivals, the liquid-fuel Atlas and Titan, it has three stages filled with fuel made mostly of a rubbery plastic holding together crystals of an oxygen-supplying material, such as ammonium perchlorate. The ingredients are first blended to form a semiliquid mass like peanut butter. This is pumped with extreme care into the rocket casing and cured...