Originally published November 18 2005
Last launch for retiring Titan rocket
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Titan's last flight sent a spy satellite into orbit on for the National Reconnaissance Office. The 368th launch was Titan's last due to the availability of a cheaper generation of launch vehicles.
But you can't fully prepare yourself," said Rash, the man in charge of closing out Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Titan rocket program.
"It was a perfect ending to a perfect job," said Harrington, whose Titan roots date to 1979, when he worked as a factory technician in a dust-free "clean room" in Waterton Canyon.
For Harrington, Rash and dozens of others at Lockheed's Waterton campus, Wednesday was bittersweet.
At five minutes past noon Mountain time, a Colorado-built Titan IV booster rocket roared off a California launch pad into a clear blue sky above the Pacific Ocean.
About 10 minutes later, the 175-foot rocket put a spy satellite into orbit on behalf of a secretive U.S. spy agency, the National Reconnaissance Office.
And then you feel sad," lamented Bill West, a Lockheed systems test engineer who first got involved with the Titan program in 1966 while serving with the U.S. Air Force.
The Titan's half-century-old roots date to the Cold War era - a time when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev addressed the United Nations and pounded the lectern with his shoe while decrying the West.
The nuclear-tipped Titans - housed in dozens of underground silos pointed toward the Soviet Union - later evolved into a heavy-duty booster rocket that transported a dozen Gemini missions.
The first came to rest on the bottom of the Atlantic.
The next two put satellites into useless orbits.
Shortly before the satellite's expected deployment, a stream of telemetry data tracking the rocket's vital signs abruptly stopped.
After the last Titan IV launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral in April, 325 jobs were eliminated there.
After watching the launch, Rash summed it up: "People are happy because we were successful.
The ICBM was the vanguard of America's nuclear deterrent force for 23 years, from 1959 to 1982.
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