No, the Snark missile’s name doesn’t mean what you might think at first. Northrop Corp. founder Jack Northrop took the name from the author Lewis Carroll’s mythical animal character “the Snark“ in his 1876 poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.”
In October 1945, two months after deploying the atomic bomb in Japan, the United States Air Force put forward the request for proposals to develop an unmanned aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons remotely.
Northrop Corp. was the first defense contractor to respond. Its Snark program would create the first intercontinental cruise missile developed for the armed forces.
Jack Northrop was an experienced aircraft engineer who started his first aviation firm, Avion, in 1928. After various business travails during the 1930s, he teamed with co-founder Moye Stephens, who’d located an ideal site for the physical plant in Hawthorne, to form the new company.
The site south of 120th St. between Prairie Ave. and Crenshaw Blvd. had an adjoining air strip which the company named Northrop Field. With the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. military took control of the strip. It was returned to the city in 1946, and officially became Hawthorne Municipal Airport in 1948.
Under a cooperative agreement, Northrop Corp. continued to use the field for aviation development and testing. Its aircraft manufacturing plant was located just south of the airstrip.
The SM-62 Snark missile program began in secret at the Hawthorne location following the end of the war, in October 1945. It would remain a classified program for the next several years.
Its builders needed not only to design and build a missile capable of long-range unmanned flight – it ultimately would have a range of 6,325 miles – but also had to devise an automated guidance system capable of guiding the aircraft to its target.
Specifications and capabilities for the missile were upgraded during its first few years of development as its technology became more sophisticated.
Testing of the early version of the missile, the N-25, took place at Holloman AFB in New Mexico from 1951-52. The first prototype flight of the Snark missile took place on Aug. 6, 1953, after the testing had been moved to larger facilities at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
As it turned out, the missile performed well, but the guidance system was another matter. Perfecting it took years.
Engineers settled on the Nortronics navigation system, which was capable of reading the position of stars in all kinds of weather, and using celestial navigation to guide the missile’s flight. The technology had never been used on missiles before.
This and other technological challenges meant the Snark wouldn’t become ready for implementation by its 1953 target date. In fact, it would take several more years, causing doubts about its efficacy from government defense experts.
Such problems weren’t uncommon during the aerospace buildup of the 1950s, as engineers and developers tried to harness all kinds of new technologies.
By 1956, the push was on to make the Snark operational through increased testing. One such test flight took place on Dec. 5 of that year, when a Snark missile was sent on a test flight that would ostensibly take it from Cape Canaveral to Puerto Rico and back.
At first, technicians received signals indicating the missile was on course, but it didn’t last. The missile began veering off track, and, worse, failed to respond to commands sent to its system to correct its flight path.
Its last known location was somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, headed on a course for the Amazonian jungles of Brazil. It was never found.
Despite such misadventures – observers joked that the seas in the area around the Cape were “Snark-infested waters” – the Snark missile program eventually did become operational.
The 702nd Strategic Missile Wing under the Strategic Air Command (SAC), was activated at Presque Isle AFB in northern Maine on Jan. 1, 1959, and the first Snark missile arrived that May. In March 1960, the first Snark was placed in service on official alert at Presque Isle.
But time and rapidly advancing technology had caught up with the Snark program. In June 1961, President John F. Kennedy ended the program, declaring it obsolete, and the 702nd Wing was disbanded.
Kennedy had determined that a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), including the Atlas and Titan programs, were superior choices, and shut the Snark program down.
Jack Northop’s company emerged unscathed, becoming one of the leading aerospace firms in the U.S. Northrop died in 1981 after a long illness.
Northrop Corp. merged with Grumman in 1994, and closed its Hawthorne aircraft plant in 1997. Following Northrop’s departure, SpaceX occupied the plant from 2008 until owner Elon Musk announced the company’s move to Texas in July 2024.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
“The Day They Lost the Snark,” by J.P. Anderson, Air & Space Forces Magazine, Dec. 1, 2004.
Los Angeles Times archives.
“Northrop SM-62 Snark,” National Museum of the United States Force website.
“Snark,” Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum website.
Wikipedia.
1950s Northrop recruitment film featuring the Snark missile and extolling the appeal of working and living in Southern California:
Hello Sam. My name is James Nelson. My Dad was involved in the SM-62 development program for a few years before my time.
I enjoyed the many stories he recounted. I could never get enough nor weary of hearing about the Shark Infested waters off Cape Canaveral. There were so so many people involved in that project that I’m sure his name is deeply buried within the sheer number of others involved, not to mention the number of launch locations. In Florida alone I can recall mainly The Cape, Patrick, Eglin and perhaps a couple more. His name was Major James R Nelson of Cocoa Beach.
I still have managed to hang on to hours of taped telemetry an a few hours of color footage of gone wild on launch.
But now to my query. I’m pushing 67years and all this media gathering dust. All this stuff is in great condition and I beginning to wonder what to do with all this stuff. Do you suppose it would be of value to any archive, musium or a collector’s vault?
The film is on 16mm Koda color. I haven’t run them in at least a couple of decades. I’d like to run them but I’m not sure what might happen such as damaging the film.
I have been the unofficial custodian of this stuff for over forty years and time is marching on.And for me I just don’t want them ending up in some dumpster.
Perhaps you might have any suggestions what I can do with them.
If you might be inclined to pass on any ideas, feel free to let me know. If so, I’d appreciate any ideas.
Thanx a bunch,
James F Nelson , 10 Percy Drive, Wolfeboro NH 03894
dittmar440@msn.comdittmar440@msn.com
LikeLike