Orbital ATK – On the road north from the Golden Spike National Historic Park, in the middle of flipping nowhere Utah, you come across a display of America’s most famous rockets whose names represent a who’s who of the drive to win the Cold War and conquer space and the dodgier parts of Earth. Orbital ATK is a company created last year as a merger or Alliant and Orbital Sciences to create a $4.5B defense and space contractor and they are the main contractor developing the next generation solid fuel boosters for the Space Launch System that will succeed the Space Shuttle.

The large horizontal rocket is the Space Shuttle booster. The tallest one is the Minuteman which is the only remaining land-based ICBM which came into service back in 1962. Also on display here are an array of other rockets meant to do damage in all sorts of ways – Polaris and Trident are submarine launched ICBMs, Patriot is a surface to air missile, Sidewinder is air-air, and Hellfire is air-ground.

It seems that here in Promontory, Utah they make the motors for missile systems from Raytheon and others and the facilities are scattered far and wide – assume they don’t want an accident in one plant to blow up the whole of bloody Utah.