The 3 Ts.

In the summer of 1963, a few months before he was shot, JFK sat on the deck of USS Kitty Hawk which was then the largest aircraft carrier in the fleet. He was attending what we used to call a dog and pony show. A little display  of the Navy’s surface to air missile might. The stars of this show were the three Ts. A Talos a super range ramjet power monster designed to bring down half of most air forces in one shot. The big guy on the left in this picture. A Terrier, a two stage “intermediate range” missile, IE a missile with a booster and a Tartar. Tarter was essentially a single stage SAM with a DTRM, a Duel Thrust Rocket Motor. It had a ultra fast burning solid fuel rocket grain that served as the booster and then there was a sustainer portion of solid fuel that would provide the thrust to finish the job. It also had semiactive radar homing. Tarter was the close in, twenty miles or less, defense for the fleet. The terrier is the bird in the middle of this picture and the tarter is the right hand bird.

The purpose of this show was to fire all three birds at the same target with them all hitting the target at the same time. Of course things that complicated take on a life of their own.

Kennedy was sitting on deck with his binoculars watching the shot and the Talos and Terriers both blew the drone to bits. A few seconds later the Tarter gets to the intercept zone and then noses over into a spiraling steep dive. JFK remarks to some admiral that the Tarter is a piece of crap and off they retire to the wardroom for luncheon. A half an hour later a four striper comes into the wardroom and has a movie projector set up and starts showing a film taken from a gun camera that was filming the shot. On the film they could see that the Tarter was chasing the biggest piece of wreckage of the drone and ending up blowing the crap out of what was left.

I proudly was a Terrier Missile Technician on the Constellation, Kitty Hawks sister ship and then a Tarter MT on Waddell, my tin can.