[TheForge] Re: Titan tank heads (totally off topic)

Sat Aug 23 02:51:00 2003

> Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:48:54 -0700
> From: Michael Horgan <[email protected]>
> Reply-To: [email protected]
> 
> Used to work in San Diego next to where the boys @ Conic made the Fuel
> Tanks for the Titan Rockets. They started with Explosive forming in a water
> tank. 

Dear Michael,

That is totally cool. Never would have guessed how they did that.

I am really into rockets an' stuff and used to go climbing around in a
rocket "junkyard" in Florida every so often, so I got to climb around and
INSIDE a bunch of old Titan II-C rockets. The heads I saw were all aluminum,
as well as the cylindrical portion of the tank, so possibly the titanium
heads you saw went to some other application?

The cool thing about the Titan (and the Atlas, they had about 42 of them
there, some still on their trailers) is that the rocket IS the fuel tank.
The cylindrical tube you see standing on the launch pad is only about a fat
eighth of an inch thick, and the heads are just like bulkheads facing each
other to keep the fuel and lox apart. In some photos of erect, fueled
rockets, you can even see "wrinkles" in the skin. The Atlas was built the
same way, only out of stainless. According to the guy at the junkyard, they
had to keep them full of compressed air when transported, or they drooped
from their own weight. The ones I saw were definitely droopy.

Tom Troszak