There was a time, many yarns ago, when I was a “rocket scientist”. I was a design engineer on several missile guidance systems (the official terminology was Missile-Borne Guidance Equipment, or MBGE, to distinguish it from the ground-based portion of the system). The first guidance system I worked on was called the Series 600. The Series 600 MBGE was a radio-command guidance system, so called because the radar that tracked the missile’s flight also sent messages to the MBGE. The MBGE decoded these messages and used them to orient and steer the missile, initiate stage separation, and so on. Over hundreds of flights we never lost a missile because of a failure of the guidance system.
I worked at a design center in North Carolina. The missiles our guidance systems flew on were unmanned vehicles launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida and from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. One time I was sent to our company’s launch facility at Kennedy Space Center to install test equipment and get it working. While I was there, one of the engineers gave me a guided tour of the facility. I got to see a variety of rockets, from a Redstone like the one Alan Shephard rode into space in 1961, to a booster stage of a Saturn 5 moon rocket. (The Apollo capsule’s Launch Escape System, a small rocket attached to the top of the capsule to pull it out of harm’s way, was more powerful than Alan Shephard’s Redstone. From Redstone to moon rocket in eight years!)
Sometimes I was sent to an aerospace testing company in Roanoke, Virginia, to qualify the MBGE to fly on a different vehicle. The MBGE would be vibrated on a shaker table, spun in a centrifuge, made hot and cold, and dropped from a height into a sandbox. Sometimes I was sent to another plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, to troubleshoot production problems there. Sometimes I was sent to San Francisco to troubleshoot supplier problems. I got a chance to explore the city: driving up The Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf (nice restaurants with a view of the Bay), driving across the Bay Bridge to visit Oakland (passing Treasure Island halfway). I visited a strip club or two on neon-lined Broadway Street. In the airport gift shop, I bought one of those cheesy, touristy plates with scenes of San Francisco: Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and so on. I gave it to my parents. They hung it on their dining room wall where it stayed until they both passed away. Now I have it once again.
You’ll recall I said “we never lost a missile because of a failure of the guidance system.” Even so, the day came that the Defense Department told us our radio-command system was old and obsolete, and they awarded the contract for guidance systems to another company. The new system was an “inertial” guidance system; it didn’t require radio commands to guide the missile. Our MBGE cost the government about $40,000 each. The new inertial systems cost over a million dollars each. The first two missiles launched with the new inertial system experienced guidance system failures and their hundred million dollar payloads fell into the ocean. The Defense Department then asked us to produce a few more of our guidance systems while they worked out bugs in the new system. But that was no longer possible. Long-standing production lines had been shut down, floor space reassigned, people transferred to other jobs. I was one of those people who were transferred. Goodbye series 600, hello Safeguard.
I was transferred to work on the guidance system for the Sprint and Spartan missiles of the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system. Safeguard used two types of missiles to protect us from incoming nuclear warheads. The first line of defense was the Spartan missile. If our country was attacked, Spartan missiles would be guided to an intercept with incoming missiles high above the atmosphere. Any warheads that got past the Spartan missiles would be close to their detonation points, so the aptly-named Sprint missiles would be launched for a last-chance intercept. A Sprint missile streaked across the sky almost too fast for the eye to follow. The guidance system had to function after being hit with gamma rays and neutrons from an exploding warhead. That made the design more interesting and more complicated.
As with the Series 600, I traveled to our suppliers to troubleshoot problems. I traveled to symposiums and to get specialized training. Travel by plane was pleasant then. There was no TSA, no security; it wasn’t needed. Airlines were regulated and planes had large, comfortable seats and were rarely full. I usually flew on 2-, 3-, and 4-engine jets like 727s, 737s, 747s, DC-8s, and DC-9s. When I flew into a small city, I flew the last leg of the trip on a low-and-slow commuter plane like the de Haviland Twin-Otter or Beechcraft 99.
I couldn’t tell you all the places I flew to. On one memorable trip I spent three weeks in Santa Monica, driving to a nearby McDonnell 
Another time I spent several weeks at an Air Force facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, learning the ways an exploding nuclear weapon could affect electronics. I used that opportunity to also sight-see around Albuquerque, exploring Old Town and riding a cable car to a restaurant at the top of Mount Sandia. I flew to a symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and while there I spent my “off-time” traveling the area and visiting tourist spots like Garden of the Gods Park. Plane travel to other states to do your job can be a hassle; it’s only fair that there’s an upside to it.
The Safeguard system worked, but our country’s political leaders decided it worked too well. They determined that Safeguard, if fully deployed, would upset the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD was based on an assumption that the only way to maintain peace with the Soviets was to ensure both our populations would be vulnerable to the other’s weapons. So Safeguard was scrapped before it could be deployed. Goodbye Safeguard.
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