Aug 022008
Mostly packed, though I’m still at a bit of a loss as to how exactly I’ll deal with the cats. The sun is about to go down; some car packing, and then I’ll go out and look at the Milky Way for a while. Assuming I don’t get canned right off the bat (you never know), I suspect it’ll be a good long while before I see the night sky again. That close to primary targets like Baltimore and D.C., the night sky is more of a “theory” than a “fact.”
Sigh.
Oh, well, maybe one of these days a platinum meteorite the size of a grapefruit will hit my house and I’ll be able to afford an old missile complex somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. Admit it… you’d want one of these too.
4 Responses to “Last night in Utah”
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There was a HGTV show named something like “Extreme Homes” or “Extreme Living”. In one episode there was a couple who had purchased an old Atlas missile launch station and converted it into their own home. The loading dock was the size of a gym at the YMCA (or in my case YMHA as I’m a heathen) so they converted it to a gym. The Atlas base as shown was a lot smaller. Makes one wonder how much was filled with concrete before it was marked surplus and sold on the open real estate market.
The land it was on was big enough for a dairy farm where I grew up near Niagara Falls but I figure the rainfall in the prairie is sparse enough that it should be used to grow beef cattle (too small to make a living), grain (I’m too tech oriented to want that) or goats (for a poverty existence farm). Definitely room to add a satellite dish for network!
Were the underground domes and tunnels of those sites primarily made out of concrete or metal?
Somewhere I remember reading about one of those (I think it was a Atlas one) where they did the test of the counterweighted elevation mechanism and the missile rose to the surface, the cables to the counterweights broke free, and the missile promptly fell right back down to the bottom of the silo again.
That would be fun to see a film of. 🙂
I suspect those domes would be made of rebar-reinforced concrete.
As to Atlas sites… Atlas missiles were stored horizontally, rather than vertically, and were thus raised through 90 degrees for fueling and launch. They were stored in more of a “coffin” than a “silo.” Thus an Atlas site would have definite advantages over a Titan facility as a home… instead of a moreor less useless silo with an itty-bitty sliding hatch at the top, the Atlas sites had large rooms – as Dougs describes – with big-ass doors that open to fully expose the room to the sky.
Such sites are sadly few, and even more sadly are probably still listed on the “drop H-bomb *here*” lists for Russian strategic forces. I’ve long wondered how much a brand-new Atlas facility would cost to build someplace more interesting and less targetted than the existing sites.
Check up on that… the early Atlas were housed in the flip-up “coffin’ housings; other, later ones came up straight out of the ground like Titan Is.
The “coffin” type Atlas system was noted for being highly unreliable as far as successful Atlas launching went.