A RARE Piece of Cold War History, Nike Hercules Missile.

Indexado: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]All right. So, it's sold.

[00:00:04]It's gone. It sucks that you didn't sell them as a pair, but maybe down the line they'll buy it. What was the plan? Like, when did you find it? How did you find it?

[00:00:14]>> Oh, man. How did you >> You just came to me and Jesse one day and I in the side of the shop over California.

[00:00:21]>> Yeah.

[00:00:23]Pretty much how it went >> because it was an obscure auction.

[00:00:26]>> Yeah. Yeah, if I remember correctly, was it the But County Military Museum?

[00:00:31]>> I do not know. They had all the signage gone. It was a surplus store that had a museum in it, but there was no signage anymore.

[00:00:41]>> Yeah. Am I Is that even right? Am I remembering the the county correctly?

[00:00:45]>> I have no idea.

[00:00:46]>> So, it was Orville, California.

[00:00:48]>> Yes. And I thought it was But County Military Museum that apparently been there for like decades because it was the guys that you met. His father I think started or grandfather started it.

[00:01:01]No. No. I'm pretty sure it was his dad.

[00:01:04]Yeah. Had been buying in uh surplus from the government for, you know, decades.

[00:01:10]>> Yeah.

[00:01:12]>> I would love to know the backstory about how they acquired it. It's always really cool to hear the backstory on, you know, where the stuff comes from and how how they ended up getting it. It very well could have been sold in a a scrap auction in back in the 70s or 80s.

[00:01:26]>> Do you even know where it came from? Not necessarily how they got it, but where this was originally at?

[00:01:32]>> No. Before before the B County Military Museum?

[00:01:35]>> Yes.

[00:01:37]>> Nothing about it?

[00:01:38]>> No idea. I asked them when I, you know, after I won the auction and I became a lot more invested in the project and uh, you know, the person I was talking to said, I I don't know.

[00:01:50]>> I would think that you would have an idea about where it showed up, right?

[00:01:55]>> Yeah, you would think so. The person I was talking to, I don't know what their relationship was to the museum, but yet apparently I'm not sure. Have you seen all the comments on the the videos?

[00:02:05]I'll be honest, it's I think it's unhealthy because I think the positive comments aren't good for you and I think the negative comments are just a waste of time. I think that too much positive feedback is a >> I don't think there's too much positive feedback really people don't like it.

[00:02:24]>> No, no, no. There's definitely positive feedback, but there's a huge wide range.

[00:02:27]And I think it's, you know, it's very and I haven't looked at comments in a while. uh for a for a good long while I was being pretty responsive and kept up on it, but it's fallen off my radar quite a bit. But the range of comments all the way from stuff that just doesn't make any sense at all. They don't even know h is it a person trying to communicate or is it a bot.

[00:02:48]But what the point that I was speaking to was the comments that I saw and I don't know what video it was a video that that you made um about Maybe it's the longer format video.

[00:03:04]Anyway, people making the comments. Wow, I've seen this since I was a kid. I've driven by that a thousand times.

[00:03:12]>> Actually, I have seen those comments.

[00:03:13]>> That's pretty cool that the people that it had pretty much been a landmark there at what was surplus.

[00:03:20]>> Surplus city.

[00:03:21]>> Surplus city, >> I think.

[00:03:22]>> Yes.

[00:03:23]>> Sounds familiar.

[00:03:25]>> Not to be confused with Surplus World, which was MDA's Yeah. Up. a different long format video.

[00:03:31]I'm watch long format video.

[00:03:34]>> Um, but yeah, it was a landmark out in front of the, you know, clearly you could see it from the highway because that's what people were saying that >> it was on the highway side. It was on the back fence line in the back left corner of a lot that was right off the highway.

[00:03:46]>> Right.

[00:03:47]>> Yeah. They had three lots there all in one spot. It wasn't even on the same lot as the surplus store.

[00:03:52]>> So, that's a pretty cool connection.

[00:03:53]Imagine you're you've been driving past something for like, you know, two decades. You've seen it since you were a kid. Then all of a sudden a channel that you subscribe to, hey, we're picking this thing up and bringing it to Tennessee. It's huge. I mean, I, you know, it's it's huge. I was very surprised when I first saw it.

[00:04:12]Obviously, I looked up the specs and stuff before we went.

[00:04:15]>> You can really prepare you.

[00:04:17]>> So, yeah, it's it's like 43 ft long, and that's 43 ft. That's big. But it's not like standing next to it like, wow. So, this is 43 ft. This is big big uh wingspan 8 and 1/2 ft I think something like that on the diagonal.

[00:04:33]It's large and equally tall. It's 8 1/2 ft tall at the back of the fence. So you don't know where it came from.

[00:04:41]>> Don't know. We know where it is now and you know where it's going. What's the plan for it? It's going to the National Museum of Military Vehicles >> in Dubo, Wyoming to be part of their Cold War collection. They're opening a new wing of the museum. Not sure what the name of that wing is going to be, but it it specifically focused on the Cold War.

[00:05:00]And man, what a not just you've got the complete missile with the complete quad booster pack, but you've got the original carts.

[00:05:10]Yes.

[00:05:12]And brand new tires.

[00:05:14]We'll need tires. But that's going to be kind of part of this is you got it. You obviously had an idea in mind when you made a proposal for it to this museum.

[00:05:25]What are we going to do with it?

[00:05:27]>> Yeah, I mean obviously it was I didn't know that the museum was going to want it when I bought it. I just knew I've never I've never had one before. Uh one had been offered to me. I showed you those pictures. It was a complete system with the with the radars and that was probably 17 18 years ago.

[00:05:49]Uh but it was, you know, expensive. It was $130,000, I think, for the package with the >> launchers and radar.

[00:05:56]>> Yeah. And it was all unrestored. It had been outside for decades. And so, uh, you know, at the time, the logistics were too much. The cost was too much. It didn't I didn't bite. But I haven't seen one since then. These come up for sale, as you could, you know, imagine extremely rarely. There's very few privately owned in the country. Maybe I know of of one.

[00:06:22]So, there's probably two in private hands. Even in museums, they're quite rare. Uh, typically a museum that has a complete Nike Hercules or a Nike Ajax isn't one of the original batteries, one of the launch stations like the one north of San Francisco. That's the nicest Nike Hercules museum in in the world.

[00:06:46]has the functional launcher and >> yeah, you can ride the elevator and go up and down and it's it's all a lot of the stuff they have is restored and it looks it looks pretty phenomenal and all the history just the site it's on the original location. The radar is there.

[00:06:59]It's just a really really in San Francisco of all places a bit surprising but they saw fit to preserve the history and they did and they did a very good job of it. So, but that's what we're going to do here is is preserve this thing and it'll look better than new when it's done.

[00:07:16]Not entirely sure of the paint scheme yet, but we've got quite a few original pictures. We'll go back. We've got technical manuals we'll reference, but you know, we want to do something that uh the maybe the white and black.

[00:07:33]>> I was going to say I've seen two main color schemes. I've seen the green.

[00:07:36]>> I'm not a fan of of just the big green block.

[00:07:38]>> I've seen the white and black. Yeah.

[00:07:40]>> The white front, black boosters. I've seen the opposite.

[00:07:42]>> Yeah. US Army on the side. Yes. you know uh because this was a a US Army project was in charge of all the batteries.

[00:07:54]>> Yes. World's first nuclear capable surfaceto-air missile. The Ajax was the world's first operational surfaceto-air missile. Conventional. Yeah. What's cool about this got the original data tag on it, but this is lot number one. The fuse or the warhead?

[00:08:12]>> Uh the the barrerow probe. This this assembly right here is lot number one.

[00:08:16]>> It's got the original tag on the bottom.

[00:08:18]>> It does.

[00:08:22]It does. It does. All the stuff has its original. They have three different paint schemes we can go with that would be uh correct, but you know, we're going to pick the one that looks the best. There's one and I can't remember exactly what it is, but uh you know, maybe the maybe the fins were black and the the boosters were white, the missile was black and white, but it's the contrast between I think maybe the fins are the fins are black and the body's white and US Army and black on the side. I think if I'm remembering that correctly. What color would you do for the carts, though? Uh they would be they would be it's a good contrast. They would be the, you know, ordinance green, olive drab, you know, uh, the missile black and white with the markings. The missile slides down into the booster section and the booster falls away and the missile continues onto the target and where when it's nuclear capable. It doesn't have to hit target. It just detonates and takes out a whole formation. That was the idea. I think that within a battery uh a battery might have been 10 10 missiles maybe tw I think maybe 20 missiles and if I remember correctly so this is all you know underground and they had these these rail systems that would move the missile to the elevator and the elevator would bring the missile up and it would get onto the launcher and launcher go up and fire the missile. If I remember correctly, with within the the storage bunker for the missiles, you had conventional missiles over here and nuclear capable missiles over here.

[00:09:52]>> Were they ever used in combat anywhere?

[00:09:54]>> No.

[00:09:55]>> Really?

[00:09:56]>> No. They were strictly a deterrent weapon, a defensive weapon. They were, you know, all over the installations were all over the United States during the Cold War.

[00:10:07]The Hercules went operational I believe in 1958 and they were pretty much guardians of major metropolitan urban areas.

[00:10:16]>> Yeah.

[00:10:17]>> Yeah. just the history is I mean there are not too many things that are this iconic depicting you know an era and and this you have to understand not that I grew up in that time period but but kids in the 50s and 60s and 70s all the models I mean if you were into to military stuff and you were a kid then there's a very good chance that you had a Nike Hercules model that you were putting together yeah I mean these Like I said, these these sites were all over next to cities.

[00:10:51]>> So, are there lots of pictures of these installations next to cities and stuff?

[00:10:55]>> Yeah. And it's really how it's juxtaposed. You you've got, you know, this this nuclear missile and you see Chicago in the background. It's like, man, that's uh, you know, it makes you wonder how it would have played out because uh, you do have radioactive fallout and they were obvious. Imagine the the think about this today. We're going to deploy nuclear surfaceto-air missiles right next to major metropolitan areas and it's going to be fine. Yeah, we're not going to EMP all our own cities and everything's going to fall apart immediately.

[00:11:27]>> And then, you know, there was no public awareness of EMP back at that point in time, but there was lots of concern about radioactive fallout. And so there was, you know, some pretty big push back and people were pretty concerned about, well, this was all posturing, right? If it came to us having to use these, it didn't matter anyway, right?

[00:11:48]If we're shooting nukes up at bomber groups in the sky, we got a problem.

[00:11:52]>> Yes, we have a huge problem. The point was to let the Soviet Union know that, hey, when your bombers get here, if they get here, we're taking them out. So, obviously, you had early warning radars to be able to detect these bombers flying in formation and then to nuke them before they got to the city. Uh but they they did a uh what was that test?

[00:12:12]>> Listen to what you just said and then nuke them before they get into the city.

[00:12:15]>> Yeah.

[00:12:16]>> Yeah.

[00:12:17]>> Yeah. They did an atmospheric detonation of a of a nuclear warhead and and this might have been a part of the I think it was part of the Nike program and there was the US Army film crew and officers and they were under it and they were like this is totally safe.

[00:12:39]Was it actually totally safe? Nothing like that is totally safe. But I think the the science behind it was is that the radiation by the time the fallout reached the ground it was like background. It was so minimal that if these were you know detonated at the altitude that they were which was you know they I think they had an operational ceiling of 60,000 ft. That sounds right >> because you know as as bomber technology increased uh and and missile technology any aircraft gun it was all this you know always a game of oneupsmanship so we have a better bomber it can fly higher well we now we have a new missile we've got four boosters instead of one that was on the Ajax so you know tit for tat back and forth but I think it had a a ceiling of 60,000 ft which is way way way up there it is and so if you had detonation that altitude.

[00:13:34]I think that the the the what they were telling the public anyways was that it's it's totally safe. We're here from the government. We're here to help.

[00:13:43]>> It's fine, guys. It'll work out.

[00:13:45]>> It'll be fine.

[00:13:46]>> A lot of stuff sitting here. You've got the missile. You've got the carts.

[00:13:49]You've got all of the original, not all of but a lot of the original launching controls, >> a lot of the the panels that that the the crew would interface with. uh everything from the the radar scopes uh the high high power lowar radar systems they had for you know detecting targets and man it just you know there's a lot going on here with the analog launcher controls indicator lights on deck is there any information talking about what these panels function are like videos or >> uh Yes, there are. There's some on YouTube actually that uh that go over uh not in great detail. They're not they weren't they were more uh public oriented giving you a general idea of what the guys on the ground are doing.

[00:14:46]>> Yeah. You know, this is it's all it was all I mean not all propaganda, but it was a lot of propaganda to they they they wanted this stuff to get back to the Soviet Union.

[00:14:55]>> Yes. you know, to show them that, hey, this is, you know, we we there's an iron dome here and you're not you're not getting through.

[00:15:04]Now, granted, I mean, think our technology that the engineering behind it, the testing behind it far exceeded what the the Soviets had. I mean, we we bankrupted them. It was a war fought with dollars.

[00:15:18]and the technology that we had I mean the the research not I mean they they had some good stuff too but not compared to ours it's how much of that early research was us and how much of that was you know German scientists that brought that information over and we just kind of >> I mean really this this wouldn't exist if it weren't for the V2 >> you don't think this was the natural progression without that >> well I mean no the natural progression was is that we got their scientists.

[00:15:49]Operation Paperclip, I think that it was. So, you know, um we wouldn't have gotten to the moon.

[00:15:57]>> You know, I'm sure that's not terribly politically correct to say, but you know, the truth often times is not that, you know, if it weren't for the Nazis, we wouldn't had a space program. Verer von Braun and then the team of scientists that came over and it wasn't some altruistic thing. You know, they had to you're going to go to Nerburgg or come work for us?

[00:16:18]>> Yes. The Americans don't seem so bad.

[00:16:23]>> So, you don't think we would have had the natural progression? Because if you think about it?

[00:16:27]>> Yes. Yeah, I do. I think we'd have gotten there eventually, but I think that getting the German scientists and some of them the Soviets got some of the scientists, too. And we would have gotten there and the Soviets probably would have gotten there. It just would have taken them twice as long.

[00:16:40]>> Yeah.

[00:16:40]>> But no, it was we were already working on these things and we had some great engineers working on this. But the Germans, my god, they're the advancements in in weapons and science and the research that they did, they just didn't have the production capacity that we did. That's why we won the wars because not only were we were we good and yes, we didn't have the technology the Germans did, but we could massproduce on a scale that they couldn't even touch.

[00:17:06]>> And what what production capacity they did have, we we bombed it back to the Stone Age.

[00:17:11]>> Yeah.

[00:17:11]>> We dropped millions and millions of pounds of bombs. I I really don't believe this would exist if it weren't for the V2. The V2 was was true revolutionary groundbreaking technology that the V1 and the V2 there was nothing nothing like that before then. At what point does something become a missile?

[00:17:30]It has to be some sort of detail, right?

[00:17:32]Typically uh you you you've got you can have rocket technology and often do in in missiles. That's that's the propulsion side of things, but typically rockets are unguided and missiles have guided systems. Yeah. Nothing's ever hard and fast and 100% uh the honest John that was about the same time which we also have an honest John but it was surface to surface. It was also nuclear capable and the insanity of the honest John I mean seemingly it it worked u but it wasn't guided. It was an unguided tactical nuclear rocket. That was the 50s and 60s. It was just like, man, let's put a nuke in everything.

[00:18:19]>> Nuclear fever, >> the the Davy Crockett tactical nuclear recoilless rifle, nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes. Was that the same era of all the nuclear artillery shells as well?

[00:18:30]>> Yeah. Atomic Annie, 280 mm. Our atomic Annie shells were over there. 11 in.

[00:18:38]Yeah. Put a nuke in it. It's the same.

[00:18:40]So what's interesting is the atomic Annie was a 280 mm supercaliber projectile and the Davy Crockett which used the same nuke inside they call the 279 mm supercaliber projectile but it was the same physics package implosion type nuclear device uranium fueled but yeah got the panels. This is uh I I think in the proposal to the museum uh because I I researched this and I think this will be very good chance. This is the most complete Nike Hercules display uh outside of that site in north of San Francisco.

[00:19:27]you know, to be able to have a a complete missile on the original stands and to have cabinets with the controls into it. And then we're going to have power fed into it.

[00:19:40]We're going to have, you know, the lights flashing, power to the scopes, you know, it'll be a an amazing display. Just the the size, the scale of it, you know.

[00:19:53]>> So, it's two cabinets. I I don't know exactly what the cabinet design is going to be. Uh it might be one larger sort of rectangular.

[00:20:03]Uh because these, you know, in the the installation where these would have been it, you know, they're kind of all over the place and so we're going to want to consolidate the stuff into one display >> and they were huge.

[00:20:16]>> The mobile command centers were like five times this.

[00:20:19]>> Very large. So we're going to have functioning cabinets with lights. Are we going to try to get I don't even know what they are. Are they radar or they >> Yeah, for the radar systems they're they're called, you know, the scopes for the radars. Are we going to try to get those to function kind of like an oscilloscope sort of um function in so far as it would be nice to be able if you if you had power to it and you had some sort of signal input, it would be nice to be able to get the screen to do something. And for an electrical engineer, it would be, you know, oh yeah, it'd be pretty simple.

[00:20:52]Do you know what they do? Is it just like a squiggly line? Is it a dot? I don't know if I've seen in the videos that I've watched on YouTube. I'm not sure if I've seen them under power to know exactly what And they have a scopes and bcopes.

[00:21:06]Uh, >> all right. So, if anybody is an electrical engineer and is curious about this stuff, >> this is above our our pay grade. We're not going to be attempting to >> do this lunch and a tour.

[00:21:21]>> But the gentleman that that actually this collection came from of panels, uh that's he's a missile panel collector just to show you that people can and do collect anything and everything. Um he had gotten power. He's like, "Oh yeah, it's simple. You just find out, you know, look at your thing and figure out what what's the power and what's the just get the voltage correct and you know, start playing with it and you'll figure it out quickly." Like, "Yeah, okay." I won't figure it out quickly.

[00:21:48]What are you talking about?

[00:21:48]>> Somebody will figure it out quickly.

[00:21:50]>> There's a lot going on back there.

[00:21:51]>> There's a lot going on back there.

[00:21:53]That's the uh >> And I mean, I just I guess people have their own opinions, but you know, this is a thousand times more interesting with all the analog, all the dials and gauges and uh capacitors and just everything going on than what's in here. I mean, I know this is G- Whiz technology and stuff, but >> what's funny is a quarter of that is probably an entire room of those.

[00:22:19]>> I would say, you know, probably 1/100th of this the power, you know, it would be comparable to to all that. But man, this is just, you know, and it's not just I think all age groups and people find, you know, even guys that are in their teens and 20s are just like, man, this is crazy. Are you going to have one of the cabinets be cut away at all or have any of these in there sideways so that you can see internals or >> I don't think so. No, I think that it'll just be uh looking at the but this is the main I think they call this the tactical panel, but you could do this was a main control panel. So, status indicators and then switches you could fire the missiles from here.

[00:23:08]I just thought anytime that you add motion or or movement or or some especially something on this scale and you get it to do something anything it it really kind of pulls you in and it's just it and where I'm going with that is this is a rotisserie and so if it wasn't all seized up right now from sitting outside for decades you'd be able to grab this and it actually moves Jesse and I moved it to be able to >> Is that the unlock position or lock position down there?

[00:23:42]>> Uh, that doesn't uh lock it. The pin does. That just lifts it up so you can put the pins in a little. One, two, three.

[00:23:52]Whoa. Okay. So, it already spins. And so, what you you want to make it Yeah.

[00:23:58]This is It's been outside for decades.

[00:24:00]to all this stuff. These wheels, the bearing surfaces, everything is just kind of locked up from sitting for a very long time. And this won't be anything crazy. It'll be singlephase uh 120, but have it be motorized, have a motor here, and if everything is free and loose and lubricated like it should be, uh send power to the motor, which ideally you send power from the motor with one of these switches that are on the control panel would be yeah, quite sexy. And just you hit a button and it it rotates the the missile axially on autoplay cart.

[00:24:39]>> Yes.

[00:24:40]>> These weren't the maintenance carts.

[00:24:41]These were the travel.

[00:24:43]>> These were to move it back and forth cuz the I don't know if you've seen the pictures, but the maintenance carts, they were super sick. Like you could have your warhead and it would mount the warhead to it. There's some cool pictures of them all disassembled on all their different carts and what it function >> right.

[00:24:56]>> Missile Dolly serial number 1942.

[00:25:03]>> Do the missiles themselves actually have data plates?

[00:25:07]um that you've seen.

[00:25:08]>> Yeah. Well, the the the missile does not, but the booster section does.

[00:25:15]Department of the Army trainer missile, Nike Hercules, 1959.

[00:25:22]But the only real way to display this would be next to the Ajax. We have the Ajax with the original launcher. It was a predecessor to this and it was in service at the same time or did they decommission the Ajax use all the same equipment?

[00:25:42]No, there was operational uh overlay.

[00:25:46]You had the original Nike Ajax launcher, which we have one in the sideyard. It could not handle a Hercules, but the newer Hercules launcher could obviously do the Hercules, but it could also load and fire the Ajax. Yeah. Well, I was thinking hoping that this would be go kind of go as a as a package because it, you know, both of these uh while they're both missiles, uh they're they're quite a bit different in the way that they look. And the fact that we have the launcher for the Ajax, the way that I saw this was is because these are the original stands that it's on. And this is fantastic. It's 43 ft long. It takes up It's got a great footprint. It's very impressive to be next to it as it is displayed on the carts horizontally.

[00:26:33]Ajax on its launcher.

[00:26:38]And I don't I don't know what the ceiling height they're going to be working with is, but man, to have it I think the the overall height was in in the the vertical position was it wasn't 40 ft, but it was close to it. uh 35 36 feet maybe and maybe you couldn't do it all the way up but still you know at a 45 degree angle >> yes >> would be amazing sitting right next to the Hercules. Have you ever seen Hawk missile launchers? Huntsville. U the Air and Space Museum uh in Huntsville has a a Hawk display and I believe they both have the launcher uh and the the handler loader which is what we had restored three of the Hawk I think it's the MIM3 missiles on the transport. what's called the transporter loader, which is what they already have. The transporter loader.

[00:27:35]>> Transporter loader is what? Yeah. What we restored, got it restored, got it running, and man, that's talk about a cool thing. Well, I don't know how they were planning on doing this, >> but I've watched some really cool uh militaryformational videos about the Triad, and it was the Hercules, the Ajax, and the Hawk Hawk.

[00:27:56]And they were kind of this group, >> right? you know, they all happened at different times, but this video talked about how they, you know, grew off of each other and the lineage of the whole thing. So, to be able to display Yeah.

[00:28:07]the family, I know they already have one. Maybe it's already got a spot in the museum, but, you know, make another one, have all the missiles on there, and you have the triad of essentially all modern air defense comes from this, the Patriot, the THAAD, all the predecessors before that, which was the Hawk, right?

[00:28:23]Pretty much until the Patriot. Yeah, I think I think Haw was replaced by the Patriot system. So, if you think about that, that's only five air defense systems that we've had since it's existed.

[00:28:35]Yes, they've been experimental, but as far as operational use, I don't know, that's a pretty cool lineage to be able to tell that story and to go from the Ajax >> in the full not even from the but but the sky sweeper which they have which was the last operational air defense artillery, right?

[00:28:54]air defense gun, >> artillery. Yes, it it is. Its claim to fame was the fact that it combined uh an automatic firing gun with a radar tracker and a computer all wrapped into one package. The the problem was they spent a as the government typically does spent a huge amount of money on research and development uh only be instantly as it as it got put into service supplanted by surface terror missiles. So, were those ever used on the same installations?

[00:29:24]>> I think there was a brief overlay, but very quickly the skyscrapeers were withdrawn from service and Ajax took their place. Yeah, they have because it was a lot. I mean, it was a still a complicated system, but the sky sweeper had so much going on and it couldn't reach the altitude that the Ajax could.

[00:29:52]>> Yeah. The Ajax is 40 or 50,000.

[00:29:55]I I think so it it wasn't I mean obvious. So the Hercules has four of the boosters that that the Ajax had. So, one of these represents one booster that one Ajax missile would have and they put it together in this quad pack and so they really they pushed the, you know, the vertical limit of the missile. I think that would be a pretty sick display to have.

[00:30:17]>> That look phenomenal.

[00:30:18]>> Yeah. The entire lineage and telling the story in a cohesive way where it's like, hey, this is what got us to where we're at now. Obviously, Patriot and is still being used and you're not going to find >> we we we have a Patriot Warhead. That would be the closest thing I guess you could get to pretty much anything.

[00:30:35]>> Yes. And it's the it is the actual it's the heart of the missile. It's called a kinetic kill vehicle. And so the the warhead, you had explosives in the center obviously and it was surrounded by these hemispheres of uh tungsten carbide cubes that when the proximity sensors, you know, would detonate the warhead, this went out and you had fragmentation that would take out. You don't you're not hitting a bullet with a bullet. You're getting very close to it.

[00:30:59]you're detonating and you're throwing out hundreds or actually thousands of projectiles. Well, but and we didn't we didn't talk about this, but it definitely is worth mentioning is the fact that this was the first missile to ever intercept a ballistic missile in flight.

[00:31:16]>> Yes, >> I think it was the Corporal.

[00:31:18]>> I don't know what missile it was. It was like a white sands or something.

[00:31:22]>> I think it was a corporal missile that it might have been a sergeant. I think it was the corporal but you know took it out in flight.

[00:31:29]>> Yes.

[00:31:29]>> This is in the 1950s >> directly. You know this is pretty pretty amazing technology. The tele loader um hawk that the museum has right now is in their cuz they were deployed to Vietnam.

[00:31:46]I there might have been some firings.

[00:31:50]I can't I can't remember. Yeah, cuz there were MIGs and stuff being used in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese, right?

[00:31:56]>> Yeah. They didn't develop any of their own aircraft. It was all supplied by the Soviets. Probably flown by the Soviets.

[00:32:01]>> Probably flown by the Soviets. Yeah. But how much pilot training did the NVCs have? I mean, you know, I would think very minimal.

[00:32:08]>> Yeah.

[00:32:08]>> The real skilled pilots would have been the Soviet pilots, but uh it's in their Vietnam display. But fine, leave that there. We can build another. Well, it's what you know, you either build another or you transition, you put something else in your Vietnam display because there's a lot of that. Put the Mark 16 in the Vietnam display, >> right?

[00:32:27]>> And uh if it's Cold War, this is telling the Cold War story. And so we >> 1953 come up with this surface anti-air missile. I I think that the Skyeper came out 1953 and they're like, "Oh yeah, this whole thing just >> Yeah, just make it go.

[00:32:42]>> Just forget about it." Maybe 51. It might might have had two years because it was deployed all around cities too to help >> the sky sweeper was >> sky super was yeah for like a year protect cities.

[00:32:54]So we have this missile that comes out and then very soon after the Soviets come up with a unlicensed copy.

[00:33:05]Don't I I don't have any idea uh how much it it was but you know I'm sure a healthy amount of the technology. It's very odd to come up with a design that's so similar in the launcher, the missile, and the booster cuz I mean, look at Soviet technology. What do they do that's like us when they do it themselves? Their bombs or whatever.

[00:33:26]They're completely different designs.

[00:33:28]They don't follow any of the standard American >> design. It's uh they're notorious for copying the incident where I think it was Taiwanese Air Force the Sidewinder.

[00:33:40]They got stuck stuck in the fuselage.

[00:33:42]>> They flew it back.

[00:33:43]>> Oh, they were they were freaking out.

[00:33:44]They would, you know, they had to have that. It didn't detonate. They got a copy and then they within a year I think they were able to completely reverse engineer and develop the ATL, >> which is essentially all their air-to-air missiles now are based on that. And they're very good.

[00:34:02]>> Yeah.

[00:34:04]Winning this. Did I talk to you about it after I >> Mm-m. You talked about it before.

[00:34:08]>> It was before. Okay.

[00:34:09]>> Yeah. Cuz it was all part of your mindset of like I'm I don't want to buy this and the logistics don't work out.

[00:34:16]>> But no, this is something that you know you just you don't find in private collections.

[00:34:22]>> You don't. And it's if you do normally it's sold through. So they owned the surplus store which owned the museum which owned the auction >> company auction company.

[00:34:34]>> Yeah. I didn't know any of this at the time and as we this progressed and y'all went out there and and subsequent conversations happened all this was discovered but that's exactly what it turned out to be is that I thought because it was called the county. I thought it was a a county you know quai governmental or or purely governmental museum. Well, it turns out no, it was actually the surplus store that had crazy unique rare artifacts that they had gotten from the government from surplus auctions years before and created this this military museum. Well, they also had the surplus store and the auction company was all it was all the same family.

[00:35:09]>> It was all the same people. The people that were helping us were the people who set up the auctions were the people who worked at the surplus store.

[00:35:15]>> So, it was kind of funny. But, man, if they'd have put this out there, there would have been some interest in it, I imagine. I mean, there's private collectors and >> they put it out there. They they tried they they and I think that I was trying to figure out how I heard about this that one of their people had put a link to the auction on the auction page of G503 forums.

[00:35:39]And I saw that and I'm like, it's worth looking at. And I looked at it and I saw I saw one thing that got my attention, then two things, then three things, and I was like, wow. Uh, we got to go do the meeting. So, Oh, yeah. It's done. I mean, there has to be some good useful footage here, right? I mean, come on.