Titan II version
Titan II LGM-25C Titan II
The LGM-25C was the Titan II in its intercontinental ballistic missile role, and the reason the vehicle existed: two stages of storable hypergolic propellant that could be fired from inside the silo in under a minute. It carried the largest single warhead in the American arsenal and stood alert from 1963 to 1987 at three bases in the central United States.
- March 16, 1962
- First launch
- 1,900 kN
- Thrust
- No
- Reusable
History
From Titan I to storable propellant
The Titan family began in October 1955, when the Air Force contracted the Glenn L. Martin Company for the first two-stage, silo-based American ICBM. Martin soon proposed an improved version and received the contract for what became the Titan II in June 1960: fifty per cent heavier, with a longer first stage and a wider second. The decisive change was chemical. Instead of the Titan I's liquid oxygen, which forced crews to raise the missile and fuel it before launch, the Titan II burned Aerozine 50 and dinitrogen tetroxide — hypergolic, storable and ready to fly within a minute from the bottom of the silo. The price was toxicity: a leak could, and eventually did, end in an explosion.
Flight testing and the pogo problem
The first Titan II flew from Cape Canaveral in March 1962 and performed well apart from heavy longitudinal vibration during first-stage burn. The Air Force could live with it; a missile does not complain. NASA could not, because it wanted the same vehicle for Project Gemini and the oscillation — nicknamed pogo — was severe enough to incapacitate a crew. Of the first twenty flights, seven suffered failures that would have forced a crewed abort, nearly all traced to gas generator restrictions or careless manufacturing at Aerojet, and the result was a thorough overhaul of engine quality control.
Fifty-four missiles on alert
The LGM-25C reached initial operating capability in October 1963. Fifty-four were deployed, eighteen around each of Davis-Monthan, Little Rock and McConnell, carrying a nine-megaton W-53 warhead in a Mark 6 re-entry vehicle to a range of roughly 16,100 kilometres. They formed the backbone of American deterrence until the Minuteman was fielded in bulk, and stayed in service far longer than planned because, though few in number, they accounted for a large share of the deployed megatonnage.
Accidents and deactivation
The record on the ground was harsh. A silo fire near Searcy, Arkansas, killed fifty-three men in 1965, and in 1980 a dropped socket punctured a propellant tank at Damascus, causing an explosion that destroyed the complex and threw the warhead clear without detonating it. Deactivation owed nothing to arms control and everything to age: failing seals, a guidance system so obsolete that spares had to be replaced with the Universal Space Guidance System, and a modernisation programme built around solid fuel. It began in July 1982 and ended on 5 May 1987 with the last missile, in a silo near Judsonia. Survivors went into storage; most were eventually broken up, a few went to museums, and fourteen returned to Martin Marietta to be reborn as space launchers.