The missile launcher was designed to serve as a temperature- and humidity-controlled, long-term storage container, protective enclosure, support facility, and launch pad for a Minuteman ICBM. The launcher consists of an underground launch tube (silo), surrounded by a cylindrical equipment room and covered by a hardened, ballistically actuated closure door.
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The launch tube is essentially a reinforced-concrete cylinder lined with a quarter-inch steel plate. It measures twenty-five feet in diameter (inside dimension) and approximately eighty feet deep. The tube rests atop a four-foot-thick, reinforced-concrete foundation, with its lower forty-six feet encased in approximately ten inches of heavily reinforced concrete. A two-inch-thick steel plate on the floor of the tube serves as a blast deflector for the missile's exhaust. |