Science: Home of Minuteman

If excitement and urgency showed on a map, one of the most conspicuous places in the U.S. this week would be an edge of northern Utah, hitherto noted chiefly for peaches, sheep and sugar beets. This unlikely region, in Box Elder County north of Great Salt Lake, is boiling with frantic activity. Strange lights glare in the night, making the mountains shine, and a grumbling roar rolls across the desert. By day enormous clouds of steam-white smoke billow up in a few seconds and drift over hills and valleys. Monstrous vehicles with curious burdens lumber along the roads. All these strange goings-on mark the development of the Minuteman, the solid-fuel missile that its proponents confidently expect will ultimately replace the liquid-fuel Atlas as the U.S.'s standard ICBM.

No Countdown. It all began in 1957 when the null people of Brigham City heard without much interest that an East Coast outfit with a peculiar name, Thiokol Chemical Corp., planned to build some sort of plant on a nearby desert. Few realized that the newcomer would turn their isolated, sheep-and-sugar-beet town into a booming center of U.S. rocketry. Today the rocket plant's employees number more than 3,000, flood Brigham City's roads with traffic and its schools with children. Ranch-style homes for engineers, chemists, physicists and mathematicians are spreading into the beet fields. This is only a beginning. The Air Force announced that it will soon build at Brigham City a full-scale plant to mass-produce Thiokol's mighty first-stage booster for the Minuteman. Estimated cost: $80 million. To be near the expanded operation, Thiokol's top brass last week were preparing to shut up the rocket headquarters at Huntsville, Ala. and move en masse to Ogden, 20 miles south of Brigham City.

The Brigham City plant began as a research center and pilot plant for production of rocket engines filled with the rubbery solid fuel that was Thiokol's first contribution to rocketry. It has grown into 84 smallish structures scattered over miles of desert, but it still reflects the basic simplicity that is solid fuel's chief advantage over liquid. The liquid-fuel rocket engines that push the Thor and Atlas must be static-tested with their flames shooting downward, which requires massive, well-anchored test stands to resist the upward thrust. Their liquid fuel and oxidizer call for pumps, tanks, valves and tubing. Instruments watch every part of their twisted intestinal tract and report to a thick-walled blockhouse protected from blast and flame. A long countdown is required to make sure that every small detail is in working order.

Fat Cylinder. Thiokol's test stands are hardly more than nicks in the rocky hillsides. They need no elaborate structures or tubing because a solid-fuel booster is little more than a fat, blunt-nosed casing for the fuel it encloses. It lies on its side in a heavy steel cradle and pokes its enormous thrust against a vertical rock face sheathed with concrete. Instruments record vibrations, temperatures and the stress in its metal skin, but human watchers do not shelter in a blockhouse. They watch the tests from open hillsides. "Distance is cheaper," they say, "than concrete and periscopes."