Henry Spencer wrote:


You probably saw the Atlas-Agena collapse sequence from the Vandenberg PAO
videotape "30 Years of Glory", which was unidentified for a number of
years. It's now thought to have been Atlas 190D, destroyed 11 May 1963,
probably during facilities checkout or crew training in preparation for
the first KH-7 GAMBIT launch (which occurred two months later). The Agena
and payload do not seem to have been flight hardware.


That's nice to know, I'd hate to be near the pad when a load of
hydrazine and nitric acid comes plummeting out of the sky towards me.
What really comes across in the video is how thin the balloon tanks on
the Atlas were. You read about that a lot, but in the film they look
about as sturdy as the aluminum foil dome over a pan of Jiffy-Pop
popcorn- they don't just rupture, they spread out in the wind like a
ship's sails.