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Last Titan Launch from Florida
The Breeze writes "Driving along San Diego's freeways, I often passed a large Lockheed Martin facility that had big ATLAS and TITAN logos on them - it looked like it was still operating, even though I thought the Titan missile had been retired years ago. Well, according to CNN, the last Titan to be launched from Florida just took off with a classified military payload. I had no idea that they were still using 50-year old technology to launch stuff into space. If you are not adverse to MS Word documents, Patrick AFB, (the Air Force station at Cape Canaveral) has some press releases about the launch. Interested parties might want to click here for more info on Titan, along with links to the Titan Missile Museum where you can actually see a Titan in a silo -- and where Zeframe Cochrane launched his first warp ship from."
Last night I was at disney's grad nite, and we saw the rocket and at first we thoguht it was like a plane with sparks coming off the end or something, I dont know, it didnt look like anything we had seen, except for a shuttle, but we knew they werent launching a shuttle. But now I know it was the titan. Its pretty cool to have seen what was probably the last titan to ever be launched.
The Titan II was even Man rated. The Titan 3 was supposed to be. The old Deltas and Atlas's where even older. The Delta was based on the Thor and the Titan I was the next generation ICBM after the Atlas. The current Atlas and Deltas are totally new rockets with old names.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I worked on my first Titan-Centaur in 1989, and at that point there were already end-items assigned out 10+ years. Launch vehicles are based on methodical and tested revisions to proven platforms. Mistakes are expensive. For context, I got the task to replace a program that managed end item change tracking. I was given the original source code on green-bar; the change note entries were in double letters by 1959.
according to what I read, some dude from space.com seems to know all about it and says nasa isn't doing any other space launches and the satellite launch is the only thing it could be.
I live in Titusville, FL and work in Cocoa Beach as a subcontractor to the military. Patrick Air Force Base is a different and separate entity to Cape Cavanaveral Air Force Station.
As a badged and cleared employee, I've walked around the base of the gantries from which they launch Titans, after attaching the boosters, the payload, then the command (autopilot, etc.) module on top.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
As others have noted its not exactly the same technology, its just the same name a company and team used over decades for a family of launchers as are Delta and Atlas.
And as others have noted much of the technology really was good and didn't need to evolve.
But it should also be noted there is a good reason expendable booster evolution has been slow in the U.S.
In particular the Space Shuttle completely decimated and paralyzed expendable booster development in the 70's and early 80's and set it back for at least a decade if not two in the U.S. If you recall there was a NASA mandate during the Shuttle's heyday that all NASA satellites would be launched on it, the DOD similarly, though somewhat more reluctantly, put all its eggs in the shuttle basket which nearly wiped out the business for expendable boosters for a long period.. It wasn't until the Challenger disaster that everyone in the U.S. remembered unmanned expendable boosters were really way better for launching satellites.
At that point Delta, Titan and Atlas went from nearly dead to rebirth but it took years to revive the expendible boost production lines and just get them back where they were before the Shuttle nuked them.
Delta in particular was the team which was given a charter to build new booster technology, there is a pretty good writeup on Space Review. The Delta Heavy is one candidate for launching the CEV. Unfortunately just about every launch vehicle we have compares poorly to the Saturn V if you ware serious about going to the Moon or Mars. All the CEV plans I've seen require multiple launches and docking all the components in LEO to get to the Moon versus the Saturn V doing it all in one shot. Delta 4 Heavy is a slight improvement over the Saturn 1B which was the last U.S. man rated expendable booster used in Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz but pales against Saturn V.
All in all its kind of sad commentary on how little America's space program has progressed since it peaked during Apollo.
The CEV program is going to take a good 10 years, if a miracle occurs and it stays on schedule, until there is a manned launch and then its going to be putting a tiny conical capsule in to LEO. It will be a disappointment to anyone who remembers Apollo. In most respects they would be better served if they just dust off all the Apollo plans and reverse engineer that hardware systems, update things like the computers that have progressed dramaticly, and pick up where Apollo left off versus spending 10 years and a lot of money to design something less capable than Apollo.
@de_machina
Also I had the pleasure of taking apart an one of these Titan guidance computers. It was about the size of a big suitcase. Built to take many G's-- it had a aluminum case about 3/4 inch thick. All thge modules inside were potted in a tough pink styrofoam.
An amazing device with about 300 credit-card sized PC boards all plugged in and soldered into a backplane. Each PC board had what looked like four to six Westinghouse flat-pack IC's, probably DTL logic, maybe four gates max per chip. Amazing what they could do with that little hardware. The memory was some PC-board version of magnetic wire memory, as cores probably couldnt take the g's and vibration. Sobering to be poking through a device designed to land 9 Megatons on the Ruskies.
A friend and I were on our way to Orlando and accidentally drove around 70 miles too far West. While we were driving back north east to find our way back onto the turnpike we saw the whole launch. At first we thought it was a really bright light above a farm house in the distance, until we got out of the car and saw the trail of smoke. The rocket appeared to break off into 3 pieces near the end of it's visibility. I am assuming these were some of its lower stage boosters? An unbelievable thing to see by accident, makes me think i should get lost more often.
The US Military promised to blow up the rocket should it veer off course and potentially endanger Canadians off the coast of Newfounland.
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http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/04/3
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I assumed it would be some sort of splashdown. There's got to be a lake of some kind in Montana or a bordering state, even though that might be a hard target to hit. He could've made a ground landing, but we have to assume that the Phoenix was intact since Picard says it was later placed in the Smithsonian.
The crew compartment could've detached and splashed down a la Apollo, but that doesn't make much sense to me. It would probably be uneconomical to discard all the warp technology in the main body of the craft.