Titan II: The Damascus Silo Blast, Gemini Launches and Voyager's Ride

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Titan rocket family flew 368 missions between 1959 and 2005, and it began as a weapon. The Martin Company built Titan I as a costly backup to the slow Atlas ICBM program. It burned RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen, which boiled off and could not be kept in a sealed silo, and it was steered by an underground Univac Athena computer that tracked the missile by radar and radioed commands to it. Titan II switched to hypergolic propellants, Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide, which ignite on contact and stay liquid at room temperature, so missiles could sit fueled for years. The toll came in the silos: in August 1965 a welding fire in a silo near Searcy, Arkansas killed 53 construction workers, and in 1978 a ruptured oxidizer line near Rock, Kansas forced 200 residents to evacuate and killed an Air Force staff sergeant.

In September 1980, at Titan II silo 374-7 near Damascus, Arkansas, a technician dropped an 8-pound wrench socket that fell 70 feet and punctured the missile's thin aluminum skin. Hours later the silo exploded, throwing the 740-ton launch door 200 feet into the air and ejecting a 9-megaton warhead into a ditch without detonating it. One airman died and 21 were injured. The Air Force retired all 54 Titan IIs by 1987 in favor of the solid-fuel MX Peacekeeper. By then NASA had flown 12 Titan II GLVs for the Gemini program from 1964 to 1966, every one successful. Program 624A turned the core into the Titan III for spy satellites, the Titan IIIE with a Centaur upper stage launched the Viking and Voyager missions, a Titan IV carried Cassini-Huygens in 1997, and the last Titan IVB left Vandenberg on October 19, 2005.

• Titan II's fuel tank walls were the missile's outer skin, an aluminum alloy less than a tenth of an inch thick in places.
• For Gemini, engineers removed the missile's retro rockets and swapped its inertial targeting guidance for radio ground guidance to track the astronauts' ascent.
• The Titan 23G program pulled deactivated Titan II missiles from storage, cleaned and recertified them, and launched government satellites from Vandenberg with a perfect record.
• The Titan IIIC steered its solid boosters by injecting nitrogen tetroxide into one side of the exhaust to deflect the thrust.
• The Titan IIIB with an Agena upper stage placed KH-8 Gambit reconnaissance satellites in polar orbit, and Titan rockets also launched the Vela Hotel nuclear detection satellites.