Robert Burkett

 EDWARDS AFB (continued)

Ellen and I settled in at our apartment in Mojave, carless but not homeless. As I said the Riccominis were very kind to us (maybe out of pity). All was not doom and glum. We made quite a few friends who shared our situation. I settled into my new job at the missile test center. It turned out that most of the people who worked there were civilians. The two missiles being tested were designed by Convair and McDonald Douglas. The Atlas missile was designed as an ICBM (long range) and the Thor was an IRBM (intermediate range). Our job was to test them under simulated flight conditions. This was accomplished by placing them tied down in a metal structure with a gimbal at the top so the missiles thought they were in the air without leaving the tower. My title was Missile Airman, the first so designated. None of the "training" I received at Lowry was of any use so I had to learn "on the job" (OJT). I spent a lot of my early time gluing a device called a strain gauge to various parts of the missile. When the missile was fired we monitored stress points using a device called an oscillograph. The read out was similar to what an EKG looks like for a heart patient. Both of the first missiles on which I worked were powered by a combination of LOX (liquid oxygen) and JP4 (a fancy name for kerosene). The JP4 is essentially the same fuel used by a jet engine but much more powerful the way it was used. LOX is extremely cold (-294 degrees F) and can cause all kind of problems, which it often did! The head of the department was a civilian named Samuel Gomperts(sp). He was very high up in civilian ranks. I think he was a GS17. My "boss" was a Master Sargent Hodges,  a WWII left over. He knew nothing about the job and spent most of his time battling hemorrhoids (poor guy). He and I got along very well and he was partially responsible for the last phase of my job. But, before that, I went to the hazardous duty section of missile testing, which was a great job. When we started we were testing solid propellants to be used later in the Minuteman Missile which could be stored and fired from underground and were always fueled. With the Altas, it could only be fueled just prior to launch as LOX doesn't store for long periods. An obvious problem with that was the time to fuel, which was longer than an enemy ICBM would take to reach the US. One of the tests I did before the Minuteman was to try to "fastfuel" the Atlas using a superpump! A fellow airman and I were down in a bunker measuring flow when one of the valves decided to bust open. It quickly filled the chamber with oxygen (now a gas). We hit the stairs and the first thing I did was light up a cigarette. My better judgement took over and I tossed the weed as far away as possible. Oxygen is a marvelous catalyst for combustion!

When transferred to the hazardous duty site, we had at our disposal a Weapons Carrier (WWII vintage) and a Sherman Tank. We used the Weapons Carrier for transportation (and fun) and the tanks housed our instruments. We launched rocket engines from an above ground silo to try to ascertain the burn rate and amount of tumbling (end over end). It truly was hazardous and we were lucky no one was injured. Finally we were rewarded with a 1/3 mockup of a solid propellant missile which we fired tethered in an above ground silo. To light the engine we had to have a munitions "expert". This was my first exposure to a working officer (2nd Lt). He was dumber than a box of rocks so I asked him to stay out of the way. He reminded me that I was an "inferior" grade and owed him respect. I think my response was something like "I'm just trying to keep you alive, sir!" He never said another cross word to me. We were very successful in our tests and not long after a Minuteman was launched using tethers without a full load of fuel. That was good because Atlas kept blowing up at Cape Canaveral. The last 6 months at Edwards, Sgt Hodges recommended me as a writer for the training manual for Missile Airman: so I spent the remainder of my time in the office. I don't know if there ever were more airmen assigned to missile testing, but they had a manual.

NEXT: back to home life at Edwards

MINUTEMAN MISSILE (in silo)