Titan III Research and Development 1967 US Air Force

more at http://quickfound.net/

TITAN III RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT -- FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW

DESCRIBES CHARACTERISTICS AND CAPABILITIES OF TITAN III LAUNCH VEHICLE AND ITS COMPONENTS. DOCUMENTS ASSEMBLY OF TITAN III AT CAPE KENNEDY AND PREPARATION FOR LAUNCH. ALSO EXPLAINS TITAN'S VERSATILITY IN CARRYING A VARIETY OF SPACE VEHICLES.

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(rocket_family)

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Titan is a family of United States expendable rockets used between 1959 and 2005. A total of 368 rockets of this family were launched, including all the Project Gemini manned flights of the mid-1960s. Titans were part of the US Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile fleet until 1987, and lifted other American military payloads as well as civilian agency intelligence-gathering satellites. Titans also were used to send highly successful interplanetary scientific probes throughout the Solar System...

The Titan III was a modified Titan II with optional solid rocket boosters. It was developed on behalf of the United States Air Force as a heavy-lift satellite launcher to be used mainly to launch American military payloads and civilian intelligence agency satellites such as the Vela Hotel nuclear-test-ban monitoring satellites, observation and reconnaissance satellites (for intelligence-gathering), and various series of defense communications satellites.

The Titan III core was similar to the Titan II, but had a few differences. These included:

Thicker tank walls and ablative skirts to support the added weight of upper stages

Radio ground guidance in place of the inertial guidance on ICBM Titan IIs

Guidance package placed on the upper stages (if present)

Removal of retrorockets and other unnecessary ICBM hardware

Slightly larger propellant tanks in the second stage for longer burn time; since they expanded into some unused space in the avionics truss, the actual length of the stage remained unchanged.

The Titan III family used the same basic LR-87 engines as Titan II (with performance enhancements over the years), however SRB-equipped variants had a heat shield over them as protection from the SRB exhaust, also the engines were modified for air-starting.

The Titan IIIA was a prototype rocket booster, which consisted of a standard Titan II rocket with a Transtage upper stage.

The Titan IIIB with its different versions (23B, 24B, 33B, and 34B) had the Titan III core booster with an Agena D upper stage. This combination was used to launch the KH-8 GAMBIT series of intelligence-gathering satellites. They were all launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, due south over the Pacific into polar orbits. Their maximum payload mass was about 7,500 lb (3,000 kg).

The powerful Titan IIIC used a Titan III core rocket with two large strap-on solid-fuel boosters to increase its launch thrust, and hence the maximum payload mass capability. The solid-fuel boosters that were developed for the Titan IIIC represented a significant engineering advance over previous solid-fueled rockets, due to their large size and thrust, and their advanced thrust-vector control systems. A modified Titan IIIC launched a Gemini spacecraft making it the first reused spacecraft. The Titan IIID was a derivative of the Titan IIIC, without the upper transtage, that was used to place members of the Key Hole series of reconnaissance satellites into low Earth orbits. The Titan IIIE, with a high-specific-impulse Centaur upper stage, was used to launch several scientific spacecraft, including both of NASA's two Voyager space probes to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond, and both of the two Viking missions to place two orbiters around Mars and two instrumented landers on its surface.

The first guidance system for the Titan III used the AC Spark Plug company IMU (inertial measurement unit) and an IBM ASC-15 guidance computer from the Titan II. For the Titan III, the ASC-15 drum memory of the computer was lengthened to add 20 more usable tracks, which increased its memory capacity by 35%.

The more-advanced Titan IIIC used Delco's Carousel VB IMU and MAGIC 352 Missile Guidance Computer (MGC) ...