HISTORY
During
the 1930s, Martin built flying boats
for the U.S. Navy, and the
innovative Martin B-10 bomber for
the Army. The Martin Company also
produced the noted China Clipper
flying
boats used by Pan American Airways
for its transpacific
San
Francisco to the Philippines route.
During
World War II, a few of Martin's most
successful designs were the B-26
Marauder and A-22 Maryland bombers,
the PBM Mariner and JRM Mars
flying boats, widely used for
air-sea rescue, anti-submarine
warfare and transport. The 1941
Office for Emergency Management film
Bomber
was filmed in the Martin facility in
Baltimore, and showed aspects of the
production of the B-26.
The
Martin Company built a total of 531
Boeing B-29 Superfortresses and
1,585 B-26 Marauders at its Omaha,
Nebraska, plant at Offutt Field.
Among the B-29s manufactured there
were the
Enola Gay
and
Bockscar
which dropped the two, war-ending
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Japan.
Postwar efforts in aeronautics by
the Martin Company included two
unsuccessful prototype bombers, the
XB-48 and the XB-51, the successful
B-57 Canberra
tactical
bombers, both the P5M Marlin and P6M
SeaMaster
seaplanes, and the Martin 4-0-4
twin-engine passenger airliner.
The
Martin Company moved forward into
the aerospace manufacturing
business, and it produced the
Vanguard rocket, which was used by
the American space program as one of
its first satellite
booster
rockets as part of Project Vanguard.
The Vanguard was the first American
space exploration rocket designed
from scratch to be an orbital launch
vehicle — rather than being a
modified sounding rocket (like the
Juno I) or a ballistic missile (like
the U.S. Army's Redstone missile).
Martin also designed and
manufactured the huge and
heavily-armed Titan I and LGM-25C
Titan II
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
(ICBMs). Martin Company of Orlando,
Florida, was the prime contractor
for the U.S. Army's Pershing
missile.
The
Martin Company was also one of two
finalists for the Command and
Service Modules of the Apollo
Program. Unfortunately for Martin,
NASA awarded the design and
production contracts for these to
the North American Aviation
Corporation.
The Martin
Company went further in the
production of even larger booster
rockets for the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration and the
U.S. Air Force with its Titan III
series of over 100 rockets produced,
including the Titan IIIA, the
more-important Titan IIIC, and the
Titan IIIE. Besides hundreds of
Earth satellites, these rockets were
essential for the sending to outer
space of the two space probes of the
Voyager Project to the outer planets
the two space probes of the Viking
Project to Mars, and the two Helios
probes into low orbits around the
Sun. (closer, even, than Mercury
(planet).
Finally the
U.S. Air Force required a booster
rocket that could launch heavier
satellites than either the Titan
IIIE or the Space Shuttle. The
Martin Company responded with its
extremely large Titan IV series of
rockets. When the Titan IV came into
service, it could carry a heavier
payload to orbit than any other
rocket "except" for NASA's Saturn V
rocket — which was no longer in
production and thus was a machine
from history. Besides its use by the
Air Force to launch its sequence of
very heavy reconnaissance
satellites, one Titan IV, with a
powerful Centaur rocket upper stage,
was used to launch the heavy Cassini
space probe to the planet Saturn in
1997. The Cassini probe has been in
orbit around Saturn since 2004,
successfully returning mountains of
scientific data.
The halting
of production of the Titan IV in
2004 brought to an end production of
the last rocket able to carry a
heavier payload than the Space
Shuttle, with the Shuttle program
itself slated to end as early as
2011.
The
Martin Company merged with the
American-Marietta Corporation, a
chemical products and construction
materials manufacturer, in 1961 to
form the Martin Marietta
Corporation. In 1995, Martin
Marietta, then the nation's
3rd-largest defense contractor,
merged with the Lockheed
Corporation, then the nation's
second largest defense contractor,
to form the Lockheed Martin
Corporation, becoming the largest
such company in the world.
Source:
Wikipedia
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