Titan Missile Museum

One of the places I had read about that was supposed to be a good tour was at the Titan Missile Museum. We bought a membership at the Pima Air and Space Museum in order to get a discount on the "Top to Bottom" tour at the Titan site.
http://www.titanmissilemuseum.org/

The front of the museum - this building was not there when the missile silo was operational.

A schematic of what we were to visit - the area in the middle was the way down into the facility. The thing to the left was the control room and crew quarters. The part on the right was the missile silo.

 I didn't know that there were 3 installations of Titan Missile silos around the US - one here in Tucson, one in Little Rock, AR, and one in Wichita, KS. Each of the locations had 18 silos for a total of 54. All of them have been decommissioned. Only this one is still available to be toured.

Control room - two of the folks on our tour were at the control seats for launching the missile. Each of us got to participate in that activity. It took two folks working in conjunction with each other at two different stations to successfully launch the missile, plus I think another person had to enter the launch code on the board up under the clock.

This shows the board after the launch sequence has started (all the red lights). There was no way to alter it once it was at this point.

The buildings and components in the buildings were suspended by springs so they could give and sway as needed.

In the crew quarters - government issued plates and glasses.

Many areas were marked as "No Lone Zone" to ensure that any rogue individual would not be able to cause major issues while the missile silo was operational.

This was in the missile silo, on one of the 9 levels that we got to explore.

This shows one of the access doors into the silo with the working platform deployed. The missile is just on the left side of this picture. We were allowed to go out onto several of the working platforms at different levels.

Looking the other way, you can see several of the working platforms up against the side of the silo (the missile is on the right here). If any of the working platforms was down at the time that the silo was operational, it would take the missile out of "ready" status.

It is hard to get a view that shows how immense the missile is!

Side of the diesel engine that powered the generator that would produce power in case of loss of power from the grid.

This is looking up beside the missile toward the top - from down near where the rocket engines would have been.

My sweetie looking at the area where the engines would have been mounted. Note that this was used in the Star Trek movie - you may be able to see "ST 3:05" stenciled on the mount.

Another view up the side of the missile

Local newspaper headline from when the museum was opened

A view down from the top of the missile - we were way way down there under the donut shaped area at the bottom when I took the pictures looking up. This is a picture through a plexiglass window - Dwayne took it - really terrific shot!!!

It was a very interesting tour... maybe a bit more information than I could absorb, but Dwayne loved it! It was a reminder of a time that we had weapons that we hoped would never be used but which guaranteed mutual destruction if either of the cold war enemies decided to try a first strike. If a nuclear blast hit even right at the missile silo, it was designed so the people inside could still launch their nuclear warhead to destroy whoever had fired on us. Ultimately, everyone would die, but the theory was that with that being the threat, no one would make the first move.