Word: vandenberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From a launching pad at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base last week, a 78-ft., two-stage Discoverer rocket soared skyward into a fine north-south polar orbit. The following afternoon, on its 17th orbit, if things went according to plan, a remote-control signal would eject the 310-lb. payload from Discoverer VIII's orbiting second-stage rocket, and the capsule would fall earthward, slowed by a 30-ft.-wide parachute...
...scarcely more ceremony than a shuffle of papers, the Air Force's Research and Development Command this week turned over the first operational Atlas-D intercontinental ballistic missiles to the 482 officers and men of the Strategic Air Command's 576th Missile Squadron at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base...
...with the SAC insignia, lay in reserve, their H-bomb war heads stored near by, ready for installation in brief minutes. After five test flops followed by four successes in a row at Cape Canaveral, the U.S.'s prime weapon of deterrence seemed ready at last to serve Vandenberg's twin functions as an operational base for the launching of ICBMs against an enemy and a training center for the men who will fire them...
Within months, Vandenberg will add new sets of pads to handle the increasing supply of production-line missiles. Vandenberg-trained SACmen will eventually form nine SAC Atlas squadrons, stationed at seven ICBM bases now under construction in Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and Washington. Meanwhile, the men in helmets-green for safety, white for command, orange for fuel and brown for the contractors' personnel-are ready to fire their first Atlases from the pads of Complex...
...California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Air Force launched Discoverer V, putting a ton of hardware into orbit, including the 1,700-lb. second-stage rocket and a 300-lb. instrument package-a new record for U.S. satellite payloads (but still far behind Russia's 2,134-lb. Sputnik III). After 17 trips through its polar orbit, retrorockets were to plunge Discoverer V back into the atmosphere, and C-119 transport planes-trailing trapezelike devices to snare the descending parachute-were waiting 700 miles southwest of Hawaii. But Discoverer V was never heard from again...