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."

Comments

Long lead times

[Herr_Jones]

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.

Nitpicking

[tilleyrw]

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.

Titan -- a wild and dangerous machine

[Ancient_Hacker]

IIRC the Titan boosters used the rather poisonous Nitrogen Tetroxide as the oxidizer. That stuff is mighty bad for human lungs if it gets into your air. Also the computer was cooled by liquid mercury.

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.

Launch almost evacuated oil platform in Canada

[saskboy]

The US Military promised to blow up the rocket should it veer off course and potentially endanger Canadians off the coast of Newfounland.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/04/30 /titan-missile050430.html