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MGM-1 Matador Missile: "X-Minus Zero" ~ 1958 USAF Missile Test Center Cocoa, FL
🕑 Added 2020-07-26 20:24:54 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
Originally a public domain film from the US Air Force, 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/MGM-1_Matador
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Martin MGM-1 Matador was the first operational surface-to-surface cruise missile designed and built by the United States. It was developed after World War II, drawing upon their wartime experience with creating the Republic-Ford JB-2, a copy of the German V-1. The Matador was similar in concept to the V-1, but it included a radio command that allowed in-flight course corrections. This allowed accuracy to be maintained over greatly extended ranges of just under 1000 km. To allow these ranges, the Matador was powered by a small turbojet engine in place of the V-1's much less efficient pulsejet.
Matador was armed with the W5 nuclear warhead, essentially an improved version of the Fat Man design that was lighter and had a smaller cross section. A single U.S. Air Force group, 1st Pilotless Bomber Squadron, was armed with the weapon, keeping them on alert with a six-minute launch time. It could be easily retargeted, unlike weapons using inertial guidance systems. Accuracy at maximum range was about 1 mile (1.6 km), which allowed it to be used against any large target like troop concentrations or armored spearheads.
First flown in 1949, Matador entered service in 1952 and left service in 1962. Matador carried several designations during its lifetime, originally known under the War Department's system as SSM-A-1. By the time it was introduced to service, the Air Force had been created, and they referred to them as bombers and assigned it the B-61 designation. It was later re-designated TM-61, for "tactical missile", and finally MGM-1 when the U.S. Department of Defense introduced the tri-service missile and drone designation system in 1963...
History
The first flight of Matador, model XSSM-A-1, occurred at the White Sands Missile Range on 20 January 1949. The first two production B-61 Matador missiles arrived at Eglin AFB, Florida, in September 1953, under the control of the 6555th Guided Missile Squadron, for climatic testing, although instrumentation and pre-test check-outs kept the actual cold-weather tests from beginning until November.[5] At the end of 1953 the first squadron was operational, but not deployed until 1954, as the 1st Pilotless Bomber Squadron, Bitburg Air Base, Germany with the B-61A armed with the W5 nuclear warhead. The missile was capable of carrying a 2000-pound conventional warhead, but it is unknown if any of these were actually deployed. By the late 1950s at least, all Matadors carried the nuclear warhead.
The last Matadors were removed from active service in 1962, with a total of 1200 missiles produced. At that time, they were deployed in squadrons at Bitburg AB, West Germany, in Tainan, Taiwan, and in various locations in South Korea. The specific maintenance training schools were in at the Glenn L. Martin factory and Lowry AFB, both in Denver Colorado, while the launch training was at Orlando Air Force Base, Florida (later transferred to the U.S. Navy and renamed Naval Training Center Orlando) and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. When the Tainan squadrons were inactivated, the airframes were made non-flyable by chopping out the attachment points in the bulkheads of the fuselage sections with axes, and were sold locally as scrap after having the warheads removed. Most of the support vehicles, consisting mainly of 2½ and 5-ton trucks, were disposed of on the local market. Presumably, the other sites similarly disposed of their missiles and equipment.
Guidance
The missile was piloted via radio link and tracked via a network of ground-based AN/MSQ-1 radar stations. This guidance system, with its line-of-sight communications, limited the guided range to about 400 km (250 mi). As with all radio communications it was also prone to enemy radio jamming. While in theory the missile could be "handed off" in flight from one guidance station to the next, in practice that was rarely successful, and deployed missiles did not attempt it...
