Strange Love
Techno-archeologist Ken Shirriff has started the inspection of some of my historic space artifacts. He is the fellow that helped the team that rebooted the Apollo Guidance Computer and got an old IBM punch-card mainframe to do some bitcoin mining. See http://www.righto.com When peering into the black box of space history, what better place than the literal black box of a Titan II nuclear ICBM guidance computer? And I have some HDR photos to share of the big boy in the silo.
In the FV Space Collection, I have the 1978 Titan II flight computer, IMU and early 1959-era Titan I TARS (Three Axis Reference System). Here we dive into the 80-pound guidance computer built by General Motors’ Delco Division. Pop the lid, and we find a 24-bit processor spread across multiple boards full of TTL mystery chips and a beautiful unfolding accordion of magnetic core memory arrays.
The Titan II was the largest nuclear missile ever made by the U.S. It seems a bit cheeky to use seven digits for the serial number. I have lucky #0000069
This missile is from underground complex 571-7, all that remains of the 54 Titan II missile sites that were on alert 24×7 across the United States from 1963 to 1987. This was the era of MAD. The infrastructure to protect this missile is massive, as its intended use was a retaliatory strike — after most of the U.S. was destroyed, these missiles needed to guarantee the destruction of the attacker in return.
So, the entire underground launch complex was capable of only being used once… and ideally never.
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