Word: vandenbergers
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...American Air Defense Command had long tracked the Soviet trawler fleet operating near U.S. coastal waters. There are some 3,000 of these ships afloat, and many do much more than fish. Heavily laden with electronic snooping gear, their real function is military surveillance. They patrol off missile-launching Vandenberg Air Force Base in the West, off Cape Canaveral in the East, along strategic points in the Atlantic and Pacific missile ranges. They have even cut underseas communications cables...
...predawn fog oozed over the oak-rimmed ravines of California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, a disembodied voice roared out of the loudspeakers: "Strike order received! Clear the silo!" Moments later, the 400-ton steel and concrete doors of an underground Atlas silo yawned, and the missile poked its nose skyward. The countdown continued. At last, an intense yellow light bloomed through the fog as the Atlas rose from its pad like an inverted candle. The voice bawled: "Missile away!" The monster doors swung shut as the Atlas sped through the darkness toward its target 5,000 miles away...
Alphabet Soup. At Vandenberg the crews get their most crucial training. Few get a chance to fire an actual missile like last week's. But they come close to the real thing with the help of the Atlas T-601 Trainer, an $800,000 simulator in which each crew must spend from six to eight hours a day for two weeks. The trainer has all the gear of a real block house, plus the machinery by which instructors can crank out data on 200-odd possible missile malfunctions. It is the trainees' job to run their countdowns...
...when the missile program would require such roominess, the Department of Defense in 1957 acquired 20,000 acres of canyon-scarred coastland at Point Arguello, Calif., as the main spread of the PMR, with Point Mugu, a Navy missile-testing center 120 miles to the south, as headquarters, and Vandenberg Air Force Base as the principal customer. After the commissioning of the new range, less than four years ago, the PMR's officials began making beachheads on Pacific islands for tracking stations and training headquarters. By last week 13,000 persons manned the PMR outposts, from Elmendorf A.F.B...
...tested most of the operational missile-age hardware of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and is increasingly a testing ground for NASA. The first operationally fired Thor was launched from Vandenberg, and so was the first Atlas to be rocketed across the Pacific. The Discoverer series was launched into polar orbit, and the 1960 recovery of the gold-plated capsule of Discoverer XIII off Hawaii marked the first time an American object had been retrieved from orbit in space...