Atlas ICBM: "This Is Atlas: Intercontinental Ballistic Weapon System" 1954 Convair-USAF
Missiles playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLECC3BE1B25F14233
more at
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SM-65 Atlas ICBM:
Project Atlas first contractor's report, from
April, 1954.
Covers all areas of early
Atlas missile development.
The Atlas at this time was expected to have five engines rather than the three it wound up with. The Atlas program had recently been accelerated due to the
Soviet Union's
1953 test of a dry fuel
H-Bomb. Narrated by
Reed Hadley.
Public domain film from the
US Government, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
3.0/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas
The SM-65 Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) developed and deployed by the
United States. It was built for the
U.S. Air Force by Convair
Division of
General Dynamics at the
Kearny Mesa assembly plant north of
San Diego, California. Atlas became operational as an ICBM in
October 1959 and was used as a first stage for satellite launch vehicles for half a century. The Atlas missile's warhead was over
100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped over
Nagasaki in
1945.
An initial development contract was given to
Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (Convair) on
16 January 1951 for what was then called MX-1593, but at a relatively low priority. The 1953 testing of the first dry fuel
H-bomb in the Soviet Union led to the project being dramatically accelerated. The initial design completed by Convair in 1953 was larger than the missile that eventually entered service. Estimated warhead weight was lowered from 8,
000 lb (3,630 kg) to 3,000 lb (1,
360 kg) based on highly favorable
U.S. nuclear warhead tests in early 1954, and on 14 May 1954 the Atlas program was formally given the highest national priority.
A major development and test contract was awarded to Convair on
14 January 1955 for a 10-foot (3 m) diameter missile to weigh about
250,000 lb (113,400 kg). Atlas development was tightly controlled by the
Air Force's
Western Development Division,
WDD, later part of the
Air Force Ballistic Missile Division... The first successful flight of a highly instrumented Atlas missile to full range occurred
28 November 1958. Atlas
ICBMs were deployed operationally from
31 October 1959 to 12
April 1965.
On
18 December 1958, the launch of Atlas 10B sent the missile into orbit around the
Earth (without use of an upper stage) carrying the "
SCORE" (
Signal Communications by Orbiting
Relay Equipment) communications payload. Atlas 10B/SCORE, at 8,750 lb (3,970 kg) was the heaviest man-made object then in orbit, the first voice relay satellite, and the first man-made object in space easily visible to the naked eye due to the large, mirror-polished stainless steel tank... Many retired Atlas ICBMs would be used as launch vehicles, most with an added spin-stabilized solid rocket motor upper stage for polar orbit military payloads. Even before its military use ended in
1965, Atlas had placed four
Project Mercury astronauts in orbit and was becoming the foundation for a family of successful space launch vehicles, most notably
Atlas Agena and
Atlas Centaur.
Mergers led to the acquisition of the Atlas Centaur line by
Lockheed Martin which in turn became part of the
United Launch Alliance.
Today Lockheed Martin and
ULA support a new
Atlas rocket family based on the larger "Atlas V" which still uses the unique and highly efficient
Centaur upper stage. Atlas V stage one is powered by a
Russian RD-180 oxygen/kerosene engine and uses conventional aluminum isogrid tankage rather than the thin-wall, pressure-stabilized stainless steel tanks of the original Convair Atlas.
Payload weights have increased along with launch vehicle weights over the years so the current Atlas V family serves many of the same type commercial, DoD, and planetary missions as earlier Atlas Centaurs...