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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0014.PDF
12 FLIGHT, 6 January 1961 MINUTEMAN The West's Biggest Missile Programme THE first generation of ICBMs of the USAF Strategic AirCommand have cost the American taxpayer something like$5,000,000,000. Bearing in mind our own rejection of Blue Streak, it might be thought that most of this vast sum had beenwasted, for Atlas and Titan suffer from most of the British missile's disadvantages—and most of die first Atlas missiles are not evenbeing put in hard emplacements (underground and protected from nuclear blast, radiation and fallout). But even if Atlas andTitan were militarily useless—which they are not—the money would have been well spent in making the Minuteman feasible. During 1957 it became increasingly apparent that the first-generation ICBMs were far from optimum delivery systems; one high-ranking USAF officer has said "we felt there must be aneasier way." This easier way crystallized as a combination of the following factors: state-of-the-art advances in all portions of theweapon system, to reduce bulk, weight, complexity and unser- viceability; a slender, lightweight, ablative re-entry vehicle; aminiaturized thermonuclear warhead; miniaturized inertial guid- ance weighing under 3001b; high-impulse solid propellant, in athree-stage vehicle with quadruple swivelling nozzles in each stage; and fully hardened emplacement or mobile deployment.The missile was designated SM-80 and named Minuteman—after the "instant readiness" citizens of the War of Independence—and the programme was placed on a crash basis in February 1958. Prime contract for assembly and test was placed with the Aero-Space Division of Boeing Airplane Co, and some of the other major contractors are Space Technology Laboratories (engineeringdirection), Thiokol Chemical Corp (first-stage propulsion), Aerojet-General (second-stage propulsion), Hercules Powder Co(third-stage propulsion), NAA Autonetics (inertial guidance, and ground-support equipment for guidance/control system and electro-mechanical nozzle actuation), Avco (re-entry vehicle and support system), AMF/ACF Industries (launch and command vehicles formobile system), General Motors (transporter/erector vehicle), Cessna Aircraft (missile container) and Bendix (erection system). A history of Minuteman's development was contained inour special missile review issue on November 4, 1960. At the opening of this account it was stressed that the entire programmeis riding on the back of the vast foundation of technological know- ledge gained with the first-generation ICBMs. Everybody con-
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