Customer Reviews

Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon by Those Who Built It (Apogee Books Space Series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Atlas- The Ultimate Weapon"

Chuck Walker and Joel Powell have written one of the best books to date about the history and uses of the first American Intercontinental Ballistic Missile- the Atlas.
It details how the Vultee Corporation started building the MX-774 rocket nearly 60 years ago and how it led to the Convair Atlas ICBM and became todays Lockeed Martin Atlas V commercial launcher.

For the first time the reader gets to see behind the classifed world that was Atlas. The test stands, the test firings and the Silos, and what went on in designing and building them.
The book tells of the innovations of the stage-and -a -half rocket, whose skin was so thin that it had to be inflated to keep its shape! Some of the stories include what happened during the Cuban missile crisis when avery Atlas that could be fueled was ready to be hurled at the Soviet Union.

The Atlas story was first told in the in the early 1960s' and I find that this book jumps around in the retelling of these stories. The major problem with this book is that it is based on interviews and does not ask specific questions, like -what happened during a failure like Figure 12-6 illistrates, or how and why did they replace the sustainer engine for John Glenn's Atlas 109-D while it stood vertically on the launch pad? I still want to hear the answer to that one! There is also very little about Atlas and its uses in Project Gemini- the second American manned space project There might be a photo of an unusual Atlas configuration on one page, but the simplist of discriptions making you want to know more about that specific launch!

But these little stories are also the books major strength.There are stories about the watering holes that the men hung out in during those days, and what life was like at such remote sites like Vandenberg Air Force base( hey- this was 1960's). The book also goes into the final costs of the weapon systems.

The second part of the book tells of the evolution of the Centaur and Agena upper stages that allowed Atlas to boost spacecraft to the farthest reaches of the Solar System, and launch Americas' intellegence assets into orbit.

The book concludes with stories and appendix about what happened to the various personel, and key events in history that for Atlas included: launching the first U.S. probes to land on the Moon, and spacecraft that traveled to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

ERRORS- Figure 18-6 and 18-13 do not show John Glenn's Atlas- Mercury 6 (109-D), but Atlas- Mercury 4.
and Appendix B- what happened to launch number 64?

and why does Canada have the only original Atlas A?


ALL IN ALL, A GOOD READ!

Pretty good book. Some of the stories are great - my favorites are from test failures. Some of the safety procuedures were very 'seat of the pants', as should be expected when the rules are being written as you go. Gave me a new appreciation of the bravery of the engineers and support staff involved.

I still think the book is missing something. Not sure if it is context or some of the technical depth. I found Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program to be a better history of US cold war missile development than this book. Dry, but packed full of information.

What I really want is a history of Polaris which is not on its bureacratic success or a 1960s fan book.

I was a young engineer right out of college in 1956 when I went to work at Convair in San Diego. I knew most of the people and the history of the Atlas missile. I was in the antenna design group under George Tweed....a great supervisor who latter became Chief Engineer. The work ethic was great in those days. We were working on the ICBM that had national priority. I was with Convair until 1962. This book brought back many wonderful memories of the Atlas missile program and people that worked on it.

Chuck Walker tells the story of the development of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from an insider's perspective. This book captures the importance of the Atlas rocket as both a ballistic missile and a space launch vehicle. It is one of three major launch systems developed by the Department of Defense in the 1950s that found both military and commercial uses. It began with the U.S. Army Air Corps' request for proposal in October 1945, which led to development of the Atlas. By January 10, 1946, Consolidated-Vultee's (Convair) engineers, under the leadership of Belgian-born Karel Bossart, submitted their proposal for a 6,000-nautical mile ballistic missile. New technologies proposed for the ballistic missile included extremely low structural weight through use of steel monocoque single-wall construction tanks, kept rigid by internal tank pressure; a state of the art rocket motor with unique gimbals to help control attitude; a detachable payload or warhead section; and nearly single-stage to orbit performance through the "stage-and-a-half" approach of jettisoning the booster engines but not a full stage during the ascent. On April 19, 1946, Convair received a contract for $1,893,000 to include fabrication and testing of 10 missiles to verify Bossart's innovative concepts. But the Atlas program was stillborn, Department of Defense cutbacks forced termination of the contract in July 1947.

With renewed international tensions in 1951, the Defense Department gave Convair a new contract to design a ballistic missile incorporating the basic features already validated. In 1953 Convair presented a plan to the Air Force for a full-fledged development program, and in January 1955 it received the go-ahead to develop what was called at the time MX-774. At Convair the project was known the Model 7 (in Russia, Korolev was then working on the competing R-7 ICBM--evidently both sides wanted to use the lucky number). In September 1955, faced with intelligence reports of Russian progress on their ICBM, the Atlas received the highest national development priority. The project became one of the largest and most complex production, testing, and construction programs ever undertaken. Benefiting from the hard-driving management of Brig. Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, who managed the project for the Air Force, Atlas became the first ICBM in the U.S. arsenal. It was first test fired on June 11, 1955, and a later generation rocket became operational in 1959.

Although the Atlas was replaced as a ballistic missile in 1965, it has enjoyed a significant career as a space launcher thereafter, with more than 440 launches to its credit. It served as the launch vehicle for the orbital Mercury flights, sending John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Scott Carpenter, and Gordon Cooper into orbit in 1962-1963. With the use of Agena and Centaur upper stages, the Atlas also became the medium-lift workhorse for American human, planetary, and geosynchronous-orbit space missions. After a reengineering effort in the last decade of the twentieth century, Atlas V continues to fly as one of the critical expendable launch vehicles flown by the United States.

As should be obvious, this is an important story worthy of serious historical attention. Unfortunately, the story of this first of all ballistic missiles is told only partially in "Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon." Essentially a memoir of an engineer who worked on the program, Chuck Walker tells certain aspects of the Atlas story in which he was involved quite well while giving short shrift to the larger context for the weapons system's development and employment. It is almost exclusively an account of the Convair experience, based on personal recollection and interviews with colleagues. This is especially disappointing because of the broadness of the Atlas history. It should entail not only the technical issues wrestled with in the bowels of the Convair Corporation, which it does relatively well, but also with many other aspects of the rocket's history. For instance, the political story of Atlas' origins and development is critical to this history, one that explores the interservice rivalries between the Air Force and the Army concerning ballistic missile development (such as the Army's Wernher von Braun's challenging of Atlas' inflatable structure concept) and the inter-organizational rivalries between the Atlas project and the competing Titan effort. It is also critical to discuss the management of the Atlas program. It was the first to use the systems management concept and configuration control, with Simon Ramo of what would eventually become the firm of TRW, Inc., overseeing systems integration.

There are a number of good books on the history of ballistic missile development and operations available, and David K. Stumpf's "Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program" (University of Arkansas Press, 2000) represents the gold standard for what might be accomplished concerning one ICBM program's history. While this book provides some useful technical details about the missile's development, "Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon" does not measure up to Stumpf's outstanding work on the Titan ICBM. The Atlas program still waits its full history to be told.

Physically, this book is a 7" x 10", 312 page square bound card cover. Supplementing the numbered pages are 16 pages of very well reproduced color photographs. A curious feature of the book is the foldout flaps on the front and rear covers which simulate (and serve the same purpose as) dust jacket flaps.

This book has a number of weaknesses which lead me to rate as low as I have.

The production values are fairly low with the exception of the color sections mentioned above. The paper quality really is not suitable for reproducing black and white photographs very well. On top of this is the small size at which a lot of the photos and drawings are reproduced. Many drawings especially are unreadable.

The spotty editing is another let down. One often runs into places where Eisenhower becomes president in 1951 and similar. Worse, there are problems where someone at some point did a global replace of "Gardner" with "Phil" leaving sprinkled throughout the text gems like "Trevor Phil" and "Phil Phil".

Most seriously, is that the book is far too anecdotal to be taken as serious history. Author Walker's idea of research was essentially to look up old friends and acquaintances and ask them what they did. If Walker didn't know or couldn't find a key figure or the guy had died, well that part of the story just didn't get told. As for any serious research to cross check decades old memories or fill in gaps or tell a more coherent story - the author is quite honest in admitting that he can't do stuff like that.

The book as a result is horribly unbalanced. The first decade gets the lion's share of attention, the rest a once over lightly treatment. The "Workhorse of Space" section, barely 50 pages, is really egregiously brief with hardly anything that couldn't be picked up online - which may be the source for it for all I know.

As a result the book is sprinkled with facts that scream for more attention and greater detail, detail that Walker's limitations can't cover. On the very last page of the book we are informed of the four silo explosions while in service as an ICBM. But being very much a Convair centric book we get nothing in the way of details. We are told that 671 Atlases were produced from 1956 to 2004. But nothing beyond that. When were they ordered? When were they built? How many were canceled? What became of the ones that were never launched?

I don't want to leave the impression that the book is entirely worthless. It is not. Walker and his coworkers deserved to have their stories told and the stories *are* interesting for the most part. There is good information in here. But this book has been promoted as history mot reminiscences. If I had had a chance to flip through this book in a book store I would have given it a miss.

The Atlas missile and space launch vehicle program is one of the most important programs in space history, and it deserves a good write-up. I expected to find a lot of dry text about a defense department program, but instead it was a page-turner, as the author includes a lot of details about some of the personalities involved and the life they led at the various test and manufacturing sites in places like the California desert or the Florida coastline. The history of Atlas is part of the history of American life in the 1950s and 60s.

This is also a great look at government program managment and system engineering in the 1950s. Much of that hasn't changed much today in principle, but the modern engineer or manager might be surprised to see the immense size and scope of such a project so long ago. Equally impressive is the technical competence of the engineers involved. In an era when nobody had ever built an ICBM or launched a rocket into orbit yet, these guys knew exactly what they were doing and the results speak for themselves in the outstanding success rate of the Atlas throughout its career.

The book does have some weaknesses.

There are some ommissions, which is to be expected in such a short history book spanning 50 years. Little attention is paid to the "new" Atlas V launch vehicle, since design-wise it's not a "real" Atlas anymore, lacking a balloon tank fuselage and dispensing with the booster-sustainer engine combo. In any case, Atlas V was new and unproven when this book was published.

The book also suffers from the somewhat amatuerish editing methods common to many Apogee Books products. I normally don't complain about this since I assume Apogee does it to keep costs down and keep publishing these great books, but the detailed diagrams of the Atlas rocket are very difficult to read as a result, which is frustrating.

Overall I give it four stars. It's one of the best space history books I've read, and whenever I watch an Atlas V launch live on the web I look at it in a different light, knowing about the giants who built the program and what they achieved.

This book is definitely worth the money. I got it recently and pretty much devoured it right away. Note that it is a moderated book, so there are many voices present in many chapters. In addition to the Atlas `steel balloon' flight vehicle design and construction, it also has a lot of information about the impressive civil engineering effort that went into the construction of the launch sites. It also has a detailed write up of the December 1958 Project SCORE, achieving single stage to orbit decades before it became a NASA mantra. To the authors of the book: THANK YOU for sharing all the early anecdotes of the Atlas program in this book, I enjoyed it immensely.

I really enjoyed the way this book listed all of the Atlas launches, it allowed to go back a review the successes and failure of the program as I remembered them. It also has a great collection of photographs.

Very, very interesting. This book talks to many different people involved in the development and flight of the Atlas booster. I eat up all of these details. The people, technology, and infrastructure involved in making this rocket a reality are amazing. If you want to read the definitive history of one of our most important rockets, then this book is the one you need on your book shelf.

An extremely interesting book about our space industry. However it is written with the Engineering and Management type mind.