Utah's involvement in America's critical aerospace industry is taken for granted these days. The industry is recognized as a longtime mainstay of the state's economy, and its periodic fluctuations are front-page news.
Not everyone, however, remembers how it all began.George O. Cornish, American Fork, is one who has detailed memories of the mid-1950s machinations that entrenched space-age industries in Utah. He worked for the Air Force for 27 years as a civilian, most of the time at Hill Air Force Base, and was intimately connected with the beginnings of the state's military/industry relationship.
A single-paragraph memorandum, dated Jan. 6, 1959, is the key that opened the door to Utah companies whose contributions to modern weaponry and space exploration are well known.
The memorandum, addressed to the commander of Ogden Air Materiel Area, Hill Air Force Base, informed him that "you have been designated the Logistic Support Manager (LSM) for the WS-133S Weapon System (Minuteman Mis-siles.)"
"If that hadn't happened, there'd have been no reason for Thiokol or the scope of Hercules," Cornish said. "It was the birth of the rocket industry in Utah." The two aerospace giants ultimately created huge complexes to contribute to the development of engines and fuels for space vehicles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), giving jobs to thousands of Utahns and spawning dozens of ancillary businesses.
In its terseness, the 1959 directive out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio did little to reflect Hill Air Force Base's history and the effort that went into getting the Minuteman support mission for Utah, said Cornish. His typically complex title at the time was chief, Mission Planning and Programming Division, Plans and Programming Office, Ogden Materiel Area, Hill Air Force Base, Utah. That put him in charge of mission acquisitions and made him a member of the Facilities Planning Commission that ultimately made Hill a successful competitor for the giant project. Part of his assignment was to sell the project's potential to interested parties.
Dozens of people, both military and civilian, had a hand in the ultimate success of putting Utah into the missile program.
Ogden's Chamber of Commerce was instrumental from the first. Years earlier, the chamber had promoted the creation of the fledgling base on the sandy hill (which the city donated) north of Layton, he said. World War II and the Cold War that followed perpetuated the need for the base, but it might not have survived had it not been brought into the era of ICBMs.
Cornish could guess the future of weaponry early in the 1950s. "As I watched testing of Titan and Atlas missiles in California, it was apparent we had to think ahead and posture our base to be involved," said Cornish.
Germany's use of remotely guided, long-distance rockets in World War II had assured that such missiles would become the premier weaponry of the Space Age, he realized. He also looked beyond the early rockets and foresaw the development of more sophisticated missiles, powered by solid propellants, armed with atomic warheads and with intercontinental range capacity. The trick was to get Utah involved in all phases of such development.
The far-sighted planning of managers at Hill to compete for the Minuteman Missile project put the relatively small Utah base was up against Air Force facilities in Oklahoma City and San Antonio for the plum assignment.
Hill already had air munitions management responsibility, but before the base could be a serious contender for the Minuteman program, it had to prove it could handle the increased demands. The assessment and planning were immensely complex.
Two large acquisitions enhanced Hill's chances. Acquiring the Ogden Arsenal's assets doubled base acreage and enhanced its capacity to store and maintain explosives and other hazardous materials. The transfer was consummated by Don Burkholder of the base Plans and Management Office in con-junction with arsenal officials, Cornish said.
The acquisition of the 1.5-million-acre Wendover Bombing Range also put Hill in a better bargaining position.
Combined, the facilities gave the Ogden command unique resources to procure, store and test bombs, ammunition and aircraft-launched rockets, said Cornish.
The base already had ample storage facilities and the capacity for X-raying critical missile parts. A pad with 4-foot-thick walls was built to house delicate equipment to check compasses essential to keeping missiles on target. Hill personnel tried to anticipate every necessary precaution to handle hazardous and highly explosive materials germane to ICBM maintenance, testing and firing. Questions such as weapons trans-portation were studied in detail.
When Hill officials requested Air Force funding earmarked for road upgrades to build a new road into a remote part of the base, the petition was denied. The solution was to drive a vehicle east to west across the desired route to beat down a path. "(Then) we had a road. We got the money to `repair' it," Cornish recalled.
After exhaustive planning, Hill officials were called on to give a presentation at Wright-Patterson, headquarters for the missile program.
"We wanted to convince the brass that Hill Air Force Base was ready," Cornish said. "If the Air Force ever had to use these missiles in actual warfare, they had to be thoroughly convinced or we'd never get what we were after."
Meetings with top Air Force brass at Wright-Patterson and the Pentagon continued for some time.
Ironically, while dealing with the future of missiles that would travel at high speeds for thousands of miles and deliver potent explosives to pinpoint targets, the Hill negotiators sometimes traveled in less-than-ideal circumstances.
One winter on a return trip to Utah after a briefing, Cornish said, "We were in the hold of an unlined cargo plane with the temperature below zero. The deputy commander, Col. Vic Anderson, was the pilot. We were following a road and the wind was so strong aloft that the cars on the road were making more headway than the C-47."
Another time en route home from a "think tank" session in California, somewhere over the Nevada desert, the auxiliary power unit behind the navigator's station caught fire.
"A gasoline fire on a plane in flight is not a comfortable situation," Cornish recalled. "A gutsy crew chief, who suffered burns in the process, was able to extinguish the fire. In response to sincere thanks from those aboard, his response was `just doing my job.' "
Ultimately, the effort was worth it. The 1959 announcement that Utah's base would take over Minuteman management had immediate results.
A four-star general from Dayton, Ohio, came to Utah to head the program. A new division was created, and space was provided on the Ogden base for Boeing, one of the prime missile contractors. Thiokol and Hercules blossomed.
"Huge sums of money were spent. Hill became the management center for more than 1,000 ICBMs, and the project supported huge payrolls for more than a decade," said Cornish.
With the advantages of the management program came the hazards of highly volatile missiles. "These were not kitty-cats we were dealing with. It takes a lot of near-explosions to get a missile across to Russia," Cornish recalled. "We didn't treat them like firewood."
For his key role in the quest to get Utah involved in the nation's space program, Cornish was awarded the Hill Administrative Club's Mach Award. A letter of commendation from Col. Nathan G. Mehaffey, then director of logistics support management at the base, cited him for putting in many extra hours on the project and his willingness to speak to diverse groups about Hill's objectives.
Cornish left the base in 1964 to become an executive with Warner-Robbins in Georgia. He currently is affiliated with Medical Device Research and divides his time between American Fork and Hurricane.