Remember the Titan

The following is an excerpt from the October 19, 2005 edition of the Wall Street Journal: "LOS ANGELES -- The last Lockheed Martin Corp. heavy-lift Titan rocket is set to blast off from Southern California later today, ending a storied, five-decade chapter in U.S. space history . . . The Titan IV, synonymous with American exploration of the heavens and guaranteed access to space for both the military and intelligence agencies, is slated to carry a large government spy satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base before noon Pacific time . . . [Company] officials and dignitaries are poised to celebrate the effectiveness and reliability of the massive Titan IV and the 38 government payloads it has successfully placed in orbit . . . " So, we day goodbye to the Titan. Many of the engineers who worked on that project were at Martin Marietta's Waterton, Colorado plant. My dad was on of them. Many were the fathers of my classmates, friends, and teammates as I was growing up. If there were such a thing as a "geek detection meter," in my home town its needle would have been pegged to the right during those years (imagine a typical weekday morning, 4 or 5 male engineers, clad in polyester suits, pocket protectors firmly in place, Martin Marietta security badges strung around their necks, briefcases and sack lunches in hand, packing into a Suburban and car pooling it from Littleton to Waterton everyday, and the occasional madcap adventures when one of them might attempt to push the vehicle to the limits of its technical specifications). In Littleton the Titan program paid for a lot of groceries, school supplies, football uniforms, mortgages, braces, 501 Levi's, down coats, ski's, and hiking boots - - and certainly numerous sets of season tickets to the Denver Broncos, and even possibly tickets to a John Denver concert or two. I suppose I should mention other evidence of the influence of the Titan. That would be the Titan Manor Motel, a now run-down establishment that dates back to the 1960s and is located on a seedy stretch of Santa Fe Drive - - an image of a Titam missile is displayed promimently above its entrance. But I think my first exposure to the word Titan was not of the missile. The Metsker family, also a Martin family, lived next door to us when I was three years old. The name of the family dog? Titan, of course.