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Atlas D Missile Site


NebrPatch
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Not many back east, they tended to draw attention and were nuclear targets of the Russians, so the thinking of the day was to put them where the land is a little more expendable, however, that ended up being in the bread basket heartland. Ooops.

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  • 2 months later...
Jeff Barnes

Gil, this stuff is amazing - had no idea these were so close to Omaha. I grew up south of Yutan, and our farm is less than 10 minutes from the Mead site - wait 'til I tell my folks!

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The Meade sight is still used as training for mount operationd and a couple of other things, the arlington site as far as i know is still used but is supposed to be torn down in the next year or two. inside the buildings at meade there is not much left, just a couple of huge open pits in the middle of them that have slowl been filled in with scrap metal and other objects. there is even an old car that someone cleaverly pushed in. :)

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Gil, this stuff is amazing - had no idea these were so close to Omaha. I grew up south of Yutan, and our farm is less than 10 minutes from the Mead site - wait 'til I tell my folks!

 

What I can't imagine is those big bulky trucks carrying missiles out to these sites over the gravel county roads you have to take to get there. I am sure it had to be a bumpy ride!

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It really has been a dream of mine to own one of these.

 

I am a troglodyte I guess.

 

besides, be good protection for when the zombies come.

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  • 3 years later...

Wow thanks for the posts. Its amazing how much Uncle Sam has spent on steel and concret. FE Warren was a Atlas Wing just before the Minuteman went operational. In the 80's I used to explore an above ground site just north of Cheyenne. I was amazed the the support building corrugated roofs and light fixture were still in tact along with the chain link fence and other items. The site had a lot of good building materials just waiting to be liberated.

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There were Atlas-F silos and Nike sites in southeast Nebraska. The site lincolnafb.org has a lot of photos and information. I remember when the silos were going in the Air Force set up an Atlas trainer missile in a parking lot in downtown Licoln so people could see one. The missile silos closed down when I was in High School and the Air Force gave the Lincoln Public Schools some stuff. We wore missile crew white coveralls in auto shop class, I tried keeping a patched on but the teacher said no. At least the electronics teacher let me trade a short-wave radio for a German Army one that was on a shelf in the back room.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I launched Atlas E's, F's, and H's at Vandenberg AFB, CA in the 1980's. In fact, I was the Atlas Test Director for 5 launches.

 

The CGM-16E Atlas E and HGM-16F Atlas F were ICBM's and were later modified into space boosters. The H models were new builds.

 

The Atlas D and E ICBM's used a coffin launcher. The missile was held in an above ground (moee or less) concerte "coffin" and was raised, loaded with propellants, and launched. For space booster use above ground compelx were emplyed, with fixed Missile Service Towers and umbilical masts

 

The Atlas F used a missile silo but was not fired out of the silo like Titan II and Minuteman ICBM's. It was raised to ground level, loaded with propellant, and launched. Other than that, the E and F were almost identical, differing only in small details such as the attachment required to raise it from the coffin and the use of remotely operated prevalves on the F versus the manually operated prevalves on the E.

 

The Atals D was the first version deployed as an ICBM and differed considerably from the E and F. The E and F basically were resdesigned from the D to make the vehicle less vulnerable to attack and cheaper to operate.

 

We converted the old E and F ICBM's into space boosters and launched them with great success and low cost for decades. It would have been nice to keep on doing it for sveral more years but in the early 1970's an idiot USAF Colonel decided that with teh Space Shuttle coming we no longer would need all the missiles we had in storage. So 25 Atlas E's and F's were run over with bulldozers o save a TOTAL cost of maybe $1 Million. This "cost saving" action destroyed about $1 Billion worth of space boosters for no good reason.

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Here are some shots of a BOMARC site in northern Minnesota, apparently one of the few remaining "intact" sites (now used as public storage). These were all above ground missles, I believe the site was closed down in the early 70's. All of the support facilities were still standing, but not worth photographing.

Visited this past summer.

post-5941-0-36203900-1389052733.jpg

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post-5941-0-36779100-1389052754.jpg

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