Boeing GAPA

On a desolate stretch of I-80 in western Utah, there lies the ghost town of Knolls. There ain't much left of it, and there certainly isn't much to see, but what we are interested in is roughly five miles north of that. At that spot, just beyond a hazardous waste site (Clean Harbors waste site, also known as the Grassy Mountain Hazardous Waste Site), on the north side of said waste site, is nestled a small spot of desert land. On that bit of land, there lies a concrete pad, the remains of a bunker, and a Utah State History Division plaque to denote what the National Register of Historic Places calls "The birthplace of the United States Air Force supersonic missile flight test program".

A Google maps picture of the site.

Here is located the site of America's first ever Surface to Air Missile launch. I've briefly mentioned it here before, but figured it deserved a bit more attention. 

Developed in the late '40s, with a total of 38 launches of unguided booster test motors from this location starting in June of 1946 by the Boeing Company. They launched from this site into the Wendover Bombing and Gunnery Range on the south side of the current Interstate 80.  A funny note here is that, as stated in my previous post about it, they did not have any successful launches until 1947; how many were successful as opposed to not, I did not find out. 

The missile itself was called the SAM-A-1 GAPA (Ground-to-Air Pilotless Aircraft), also known internally at Boeing as project MX-606. It had a ramjet booster motor attached at the bottom of a solid fuel missile that was proven to reach speeds up to mach 2, a max range of 30 miles, and max altitude of 59,000 feet.

A picture of the test missiles. I'm also digging the prominent lab coats on the personnel. 

The rest of the program was later carried out at what was known then as the Alamogordo Guided Missile Test Base, but now known as Holloman Air Force Base. There, the missile was refined further to test it's radar beam riding (initial guidance) and active radar homing (terminal guidance) systems. An additional 114 test launches were carried out there until the program was ended in 1950, as the GAPA program was cancelled due to losing out to another competing missile program that I mentioned before, the Nike.

All was not lost, as it provided valuable data for not only the military and Boeing, but eventually it would serve as the base of knowledge that would go into developing the later (and totally bonkers) CIM-10 Bomarc nuclear warhead SAM missile program and Project Wizard. This in turn, would form the basis of the engines used on some other crazy cool programs like the Lockheed X-7, the Lockheed AQM-60 Kingfisher, and the Lockheed D-21. 

This Bomarc is on display at Hill Aerospace Museum. 

This also isn't quite the end of the story either, as the site was pretty much forgotten by the public at large (though, it's still pretty unknown) until 1979, when R. Gilbert Moore (General Manager of the Thiokol Corp. Utah facility at the time) and Richard H. Nelson (Project Engineer for the GAPA program from 1946-1947) visited and photographed the site to submit to the National Register of Historic Places.  They did this at the same time that the space shuttle boosters were being developed and tested at Thiokol. I have to wonder if Scott at the Unwanted Blog knows anything about those guys, as he's got a huge repository of knowledge on aerospace and the area around Thiokol.

Pictured here is Richard H. Nelson standing on the launch site in 1979, R. Gilbert Moore was the photographer.